The Box reveals its 2025 exhibition programme

19th November 2024

Plymouth's award-winning musuem, The Box, has announced its 2025 exhibition programme which will bring a series of national and international collaborations as well as major survey shows by significant UK-based artists to the South West.

Throughout the early part of 2025, the programme will focus on storytelling and folklore – offering visitors the chance to explore shared histories, little-known stories and the work of an artist whose career has spanned more than six decades.        

John Lyons: Carnivalesque

8 February-5 May 2025

Carnivalesque is the first major retrospective exhibition of Caribbean British artist and poet John Lyons and surveys the contribution he’s made to British art, literature and art education over the last 60 years.

A series of his dynamic, expressive works explore the folklore and mythology of Trinidad and Tobago, in particular the large colourful carnival that takes place on the Caribbean island just before Ash Wednesday every year. Mysterious figures mingle with symbols and motifs including the mythical ‘jumbie bird’. Vibrant scenes are laced with uncertainty as Lyons invites visitors to step into his world.

The presentation at The Box features more than 40 works, including paintings, drawings and sketchbooks. It also showcases some of Lyons’ poetry, exploring the link between his visual and literary practice and offering a unique insight into his creative process.

The exhibition is organised by the Whitworth, The University of Manchester in collaboration with The Box. Along with a beautifully illustrated catalogue it brings greater visibility and recognition for Lyons at a timely point in his long career.

The Box will also use the exhibition to delve into its extensive collections and will highlight some of the South West’s important carnival traditions through a series of complementary displays in its Active Archives gallery.

Meanwhile, Windrush in the Far South West will be on display in The Box’s Bridge Gallery from 18 January-5 May 2025. Developed in conjunction with Culture Club, a community group who have been working with The Box for the past 18 months to explore and discover new narratives in its collections, the exhibition explores Plymouth’s little-known links to the migration of people from the Caribbean throughout the mid-1900s.

The project has been supported by a National Lottery Community Fund grant and is set to reveal more about the people who came to the UK to support its rebuilding after the Second World War and their descendants. A combination of archive and contemporary stories and images will provide a fascinating insight into this little-known history.

Osman Yousefzada - When will we be good enough? continues until 9 March 2025. This topical and thought-provoking installation features a range of media including sculpture and textiles, as well as a carefully chosen selection of objects from The Box’s art, natural history and world cultures collections. Yousefzada uses them to tell stories of age-old global power that are just as prevalent today. He draws inspiration from the links between colonial shipping routes and the places where the underwater cables that transmit today’s digital information are laid and suggests that power doesn’t die, it simply reinvents itself. How much power do we ever really hold? How much have things really changed?

Planet Ocean continues until 27 April 2025. The exhibition combines specimens, objects and artworks from The Box’s natural history, art and social history collections at The Box to share facts, key findings, objects and stories; inspiring hope in the face of the climate crisis and empowering visitors to play their part in the global movement to safeguard the sea.

The Box will also reach one million visits during spring 2025 – a phenomenal achievement for an arts and cultural venue in a city with a population of around 260,000 that initially opened during the Covid-19 pandemic, but which has continued to go from strength to strength ever since.

Throughout late spring/summer 2025, The Box’s programme celebrates two of the UK’s most exciting artists and one of the most influential artistic, intellectual and literary movements of the 1900s.

Jyll Bradley: Running and Returning

5 April-2 November 2025

Running and Returning is a major survey of the work of English artist and writer Jyll Bradley who has been making work for more than three decades. Her pioneering approach and creativity have resulted in an incredibly broad-ranging practice. Over the years her work has evolved and changed, encompassing drawing, photography, film, poetry and large-scale public artworks. Bradley’s practice combines a minimalist approach with ideas of identity, urbanity, light, cultivation, queerness and community. Whilst it is diverse, there are some themes that she returns to repeatedly, hence the title of this exhibition.

Running and Returning will highlight the diversity of her practice and take visitors on a deeply personal journey. Early photographic self-portraits examine what it was like for Bradley to be a young queer female while Flower Train (2010) focuses on the struggle to make personal, geographic and economic connections through the framework of the flower trade in the south west of England, the region where her adoptive family originate. A selection of lightbox works show how Bradley experimented with ideas of identity in a less prescriptive, more poetic way in the early part of her career, while a series of films explore the search for her birth mother and experience as an adoptee.

Beyond the walls of The Box’s St Luke’s gallery, Bradley’s focus on community and place-making will be brought into focus with large-scale public artwork The Hop (2022). Originally commissioned by the Hayward Gallery, London, this vibrant interactive sculpture connects urban landscapes with rural hop gardens and is set to project a spectrum of colours around The Box’s public square on Tavistock Place throughout the summer months.

Running and Returning will also feature a selection of drawings and maquettes from major public artworks Bradley has created.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a major new publication spanning her career to date. 

Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

24 May–7 September 2025

Forbidden Territories marks 100 years of ‘Surrealism’, since its origins in 1924 with the publication of the ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ by the poet and critic André Breton, exploring its influence and the way it continues to inspire artists today.

This major exhibition takes visitors a journey through the imagined universes, dreamlike scenes and bizarre features of Surrealism over the last century, looking at how Surreal ideas can turn landscape into a metaphor for the unconscious, fuse the bodily with the botanical, and provide a means to express political anxieties, gender constraints and freedoms.

The exhibition brings together an array of British and international artists including members of Breton’s original 1920s circle such as Salvador Dalí, Eileen Agar, Lee Miller and Max Ernst, later Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington, Edith Rimmington and Desmond Morris, and contemporary artists like Ithell Colquhoun, Wael Shawky who recently exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and Cornwall-based Ro Robertson.

Forbidden Territories is organised by The Hepworth Wakefield and will see The Box host a ‘Summer of Surrealism’, taking its visitors on a fantastical journey beyond the exhibition with a programme of talks, tours, family workshops and a Children and Young People’s Art Competition.

The Triumph of Art

Ongoing – culminating in July 2025

The Triumph of Art by artist Jeremy Deller is a nationwide performance that rounds off the National Gallery's bicentenary celebrations, marking the role that festivals play in art, culture and civic life, and exploring how art and artists can be catalysts of collaboration and joy.

The Box is one of four UK partners for the project along with Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee, Mostyn in Llandudno and The Playhouse in Derry/Londonderry, all of whom are working with Deller and the National Gallery to celebrate the importance of art in public collections, cultural spaces and museums.

In Plymouth, The Box will bring its programme of community engagement to a close with a large-scale public event that takes inspiration from dances, plays, rave culture, popular arts and the processions of the Roman Gods on Saturday 5 July, before all the project partners converge on Trafalgar Square for a final major performance on Saturday 26 July.

Autumn 2025 will be a time for celebration at The Box too, when it reaches its fifth birthday on 29 September. A series of events leading up to and on this date will mark the anniversary and involve the local community, stakeholders and funders.

From October 2025 until January 2026, The Box will participate in another major partnership exhibition, more details of which will be announced in January.

Victoria Pomery, CEO at The Box said: “I’m extremely proud of the programme that’s been created for The Box’s fifth anniversary year with artists, audiences and partners. It’s a programme that furthers our ambition to explore untold or overlooked stories, re-evaluate our shared histories particularly through the use of The Box’s collections, bring exhibitions of international quality to the South West and, above all, celebrate the importance and power of art.”