TKE at Off Season
Each January, when seaside towns up and down the coast slow to a whisper, Margate does something that feels a bit like collective improvisation, and Off Season begins to bloom.
Off Season isn’t a festival in the usual sense; instead, it’s rooted in the radical idea that art, audiences, and everyday spaces can share the same ground. Pubs, restaurants, flats, studio windows, community halls, and unexpected corners become exhibition sites. Artists show work where they live, where they make, where they meet friends, where they watch the tide come in. The result is a town-wide trail of thinking, making, and encountering.
This year’s Off Season has grown again. It has more exhibitions than ever before, spread across more corners of Margate, more voices, more ways of making and receiving work. And at its heart is something generous but straightforward: an invitation to wander, to pay attention, and to discover art in places you might not expect.
What makes Off Season feel special, and why it feels like a love letter to this town and its artists, is the trust it places in artistic autonomy. There are no theme mandates, no curatorial branding hoops to clear. When artists say they want to show work, they are given space to do it, on their terms, in their own languages, in places that matter. It’s DIY, not superficially rough but intentionally open: a terrain of possibility.
At the centre of this generosity are Lindsey Mendick and Guy Oliver, both TKE studio artists themselves, whose care, curiosity, and tenacity shape every iteration of the festival. They don’t just run Off Season. They know what artists actually need: time, attention, room to experiment, and a framework that makes space for difference rather than flattening it. Their work on this festival models what an artistic community can look like when it is truly participatory, artist-led, and rooted in everyday life.
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. Watch this space and bring good shoes and a warm coat when you visit. Off Season is best encountered slowly, on foot, and with openness.
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.
📍 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.
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.