TKE at Off Season
Following the success of last year's inaugural DIY Art Festival, Off Season; Margate returns from January 23rd to 25th, 2026. Born from the passion and creativity of local artists, this initiative aims to invigorate our seaside town during the off-season, when local businesses face economic challenges. The festival will feature a dynamic three-day art trail, showcasing the vibrant artistic spirit of Margate and bringing the community together. We invite everyone to join us in celebrating creativity and supporting our local economy as we make this year's festival an even greater success.
Below you’ll find the first iteration of our list of shows from TKE artists taking part this year. This page will be updated as more of our artists share titles, locations, and images for their Off Season offerings.
📍 TKE Studios
Presented by the Tracey Emin Foundation with work developed during their Victoria House residency. Catherine’s paintings and moving image explore landscapes marked by extraction and cultural memory, while Noah’s work with sound and installation frames listening as a spatial, sculptural act. This exhibition spans the threshold between private practice and shared space.
Keziah
The Great Drama
📍 TKE Studios
A live work that culminates a year as Tracey Emin Foundation Performance Artist Fellow 2025. This is visceral, embodied practice: voice, sound, movement, sculptural elements folded into a charged landscape of transformation, resistance, and presence. The audience is held close — and invited to listen as both witness and participant. GET TICKETS
Olya Avstreyh & Elizaveta Zalieva
𝓻𝓸𝓸𝓶𝓼.
📍 The London Tavern
Across three rooms of a 200-year-old pub mid-renovation, Olya and Elizaveta turn shifting structures and construction materials into part of an immersive field of work. Here, fragile conditions — memory, the body, states of being in-between — become generative, not fixed. Zipped into the experience is a secret drinking room that opens exclusively for this weekend, a rare glimpse of a space in transition before its summer 2026 reopening.
FRONT / BACK
📍 The Store Collective & Graceland
Together with Alice Herrick and Paul Hazelton, Vincent presents work that responds to ideas of collapse and material drift. In these rooms and corners, painting and process become ways of thinking — not tidy, not linear, but open to what making reveals.
📍 Victoria House (window exhibition)
A duo portrait show that turns a street-facing window into a site of quiet exchange. Faces become presence; presence becomes invitation. Passers-by are part of the encounter. Ruby Read, the current Victoria House resident, and Kirubel weave interior practice with outward-facing reception.
Mercedes Lucy
Playboy Pay Gap
📍 High Dive
Mercedes continues her visual interrogation of exploitation, agency, and the paradox of the global pay gap. Drawing on the history of Playboy and the modelling industry, this work asks what power looks like when higher pay coexists with tight control. Masculinities, femininities, visibility and value are pulled apart and put back together.
The restaurant will be open while the show is on, so if you’re visiting over the weekend you can book in and stay a while.
Esme Keenleyside
Still or Sparkling
📍 Pomus
A selection of recent paintings made during the first half of Esme’s Tracey Emin Artist Residency. These works mark a shift towards softer colour, gentler imagery, and a deepening emotional clarity. Animals and childhood objects become anchors in compositions shaped by daily life, studio time, and the labour of care, shown here in the wine bar and restaurant where Esme also works.
Anderson Asteclines & Brogan Bertie (with Casey Walshe)
Ordinary Ghosts
📍 Flat 3, 15 Athelstan Road
Installed in the domestic setting of a first-floor flat, this exhibition brings together three Margate artists connected to Athelstan Road. Painting here is shaped by place and presence — figures emerge through gesture, portraiture, and floral symbols of personal history. The flat’s yellow balloons on the balcony signal that you’re in the right place. Accessibility details are noted for visitors.
Valentina Attolini
U B ME
📍 The Last Light
Taking its name from “You be me, I’ll be you”, U B ME is a group exhibition rooted in empathy and creative exchange. Valentina’s work sits among others in a show that makes room for what is shared and what is different — and what we learn in those spaces.
Olivia Guillot, Valentina Attolini, Olya Avstreyh and Elizaveta Zalieva
The Shape of Where
📍 Union Church
Set within Union Church, The Shape of Where is a multidisciplinary exhibition bringing together artists from Margate and across the UK whose practices explore space as imagined, remembered, constructed, and lived. Olivia, Elizaveta, Olya and Valentina’s work sits within a wider conversation around when space becomes place, and how places shape us in return.
Vincent Hawkins
In Dialogue
📍 The Old School
Dent de Lion Road
CT9 5LB
In Dialogue brings together works by Matthew Burrows, Alex Calinescu, Vincent Hawkins, Hannah Lees, Boosa, and Charles Williams. Shown at The Old School, the exhibition sets up a series of quiet exchanges between distinct practices, allowing works to sit alongside one another without hierarchy, emphasis, or resolution. Vincent Hawkins’ paintings enter this shared space through processes of accumulation and revision, holding tension between structure and instability, and inviting close, attentive looking.
Dates
January 23, 24, 25
January 31, February 1
11am–3pm
Ted Rogers, Tracey Emin, Pink Suits and Keziah
Gay Audacity
📍 61 Northdown Road
Gay Audacity brings together TKE artists Tracey Emin, Keziah, Ted Rogers, and Pink Suits alongside a riotous lineup of collaborators.
Lindsey Mendick - Eyes Bigger Than My Belly
📍 S T Jewellers
23–25 January Lindsey Mendick opens Eyes Bigger Than My Belly A bold, hungry exhibition landing in the high street for Off Season.
Gabriela Max – Monkey Gets Pizza
📍 Casa Pizzeria
23–25 January
Gabriela Max presents a large-scale mural at Casa Pizzeria, 189 Northdown Road. Drawing on her Italian heritage, the work reflects on pizza as labour, ritual, and reward. To get it, you’ve got to make it. A playful, bold gesture landing directly in the everyday rhythms of Northdown Road.
Guy Oliver – The Crunchie Bar
📍 Fort Road Hotel (Fort Road Bar)
23–25 January
12–6pm daily
As part of Off Season, Guy Oliver presents The Crunchie Bar, a new video work examining the early 2000s world of reality television. Centred on an interview with journalist Joe Stone, a former contestant on Channel 4’s Shipwrecked, the film reflects on the surreal, gruelling, and often bizarre experience of life inside the format.
Jack Hirons - More Natural Scenes
📍 The Quart, Charlotte Square
Jack Hirons presents More Natural Scenes with Tom Gidley and Dan Bass at Tom’s new space, The Quart. The three-person exhibition brings together paintings and mixed media works that question perception, reality, and our relationship to nature. In an age of accelerated change, the show asks what a natural scene really is, what might make it more so, and whether any scene is truly unnatural.
This marks a first look at work Jack has been developing at @tkestudios ahead of his solo exhibition in the spring.