Connect: Mapping Identity

26 Nov 2025-1 Feb 2026

Overview

Mapping Identity is a group exhibition showcasing the works from participants of Connect, an artistic development programme for artists and doctoral students working and studying at the University of Portsmouth.

This exhibition invites audiences to consider how creative practice can become a mechanism for connection, cultural exchange and broadening of understandings around our relationship to histories, both local and global, public and private. Through a diverse range of approaches from ceramics and painting to print-making and collage, the exhibiting artists bring both their personal research practices and lived experience to the fore, in works which discuss migration, psychogeography, cultural identity, archives and spatial theory. Whilst some artists imagine new futures within found materials, others directly respond to their localities, reflecting on how their past experiences have shaped their current perspective. Mapping Identity echoes that the places we inhabit, and the stories we choose to tell about them shape who we are and who we are, and who we could become. 

About Connect

Connect is collaborative artistic development programme by Aspex Portsmouth in partnership with the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Portsmouth. Delivered over a period of 6 weekly sessions, participants attended a series of workshops and talks covering a range of topics from practical making to community engagement. This year, Connect was curated in response to Aspex’s winter artistic programme, and engaged with themes of heritage, colonial theory and identity. Participants were invited to think critically about these issues and their relationship to the creative sector; from the ethics of exhibition making to intersectional approaches to creative practice.

Beyond development of skills and knowledge, the programme seeks to support students to find their place in the cultural and creative communities of Portsmouth.