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Auto Italia is an artist-run organisation and project space that commissions new work, bringing together international networks of artists committed to the development of emerging practices and discussions in contemporary art.

10/10/2026

Extended Opening Hours: Next week during Frieze London, our current exhibition ‘Sensual / Mutual’ by Del LaGrace Volcano will be open from Tuesday to Sunday, 13 – 18 October, 12 – 5pm.

‘Sensual / Mutual’ is the first major institutional solo exhibition in the UK by Del LaGrace Volcano. Surfacing unseen bodies of work from the 1970s and 80s, the exhibition focuses on Volcano’s time in San Francisco and Santa Fe, tracing q***r, feminist, leather d**e, gender-variant, and land-based communities in the process of making themselves visible.

Del LaGrace Volcano

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photography: Mark Blower.

09/10/2026

ANNOUNCEMENT: Rose Nordin and Brighter Futures present a new exhibition at Auto Italia, opening 3 November, 6–8pm.

This exhibition is the culmination of a collaboration between Auto Italia participation artist-in-residence Rose Nordin and collaborators from Brighter Futures, a group of young migrants supported by Praxis and Kazzum Arts.

Across a series of workshops, the collaborators have explored scents connected to places that are important to them, developing their own fragrances alongside drawings, words and reflections. The project explores how scent can hold memories and carry experiences across languages, cultures and distance, offering a way to challenge increasingly negative narratives around migration.

Building on this work, Rose has developed a ‘scent alphabet’, giving each scent category its own visual symbol. These symbols, alongside the collaborators’ work, run throughout the exhibition and a new pocket-sized scented publication, ‘A Cloud in the Fold of the Elbow’, which takes its title from the way scent can gather and linger in the fold of the elbow, while the cloud evokes the way scent spreads and travels through air.

The exhibition brings these different parts of the project together in the gallery, with the collaborators’ fragrances present throughout the work and infused into the publication and other visual materials. Their drawings, scents and reflections carry through the exhibition, while also taking new forms through Rose’s graphic and installation work.

The publication also connects the project with Rose’s wider research, featuring new texts and interviews about scent by Ezra-Lloyd Jackson, Amrita Dhallu and Sarah Shin, edited by Lillian Wilkie.

A public programme of events and practical training sessions will accompany the exhibition, including conversations around migration and sessions on rights and entitlements, the immigration and asylum system, and trauma-informed practice.

The programme is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, in partnership with Brighter Futures, with generous support from The National Lottery Community Fund and Arts Council England.

Rose Nordin
John McCance
Praxis, for migrants and refugees
Kazzum Arts 🧡

06/10/2026

Join us on Thursday 22nd October, 6:30–8:30pm for Practising Civic Learning, a discussion and workshop facilitated by curators Agnese Politi and Giulia Menegale, with researcher Andy Belfield (public works).

Bringing together questions of access to space, funding, and long-term resources across the arts sector, this session considers how cultural workers might develop alternative infrastructures that are shared, collectively governed, and responsive to their specific contexts. Combining conversation and workshop, the session draws on the organising practices and experience of R-Urban Poplar, an eco-civic hub on the Teviot Estate in Tower Hamlets.

The first part invites participants to exchange tactics for confronting the increasingly precarious conditions of artistic and cultural practice in the UK and internationally.

Drawing on R-Urban’s experience, the second focuses on collectively developing methodologies and tools for sharing resources, fostering solidarity-based exchange, and building the alliances and organisational structures needed to sustain cultural work over time.

The event is free to attend and will be held at Auto Italia. To register, follow the link in our bio.

The event is part of Giulia Menegale’s research project “Beyond Institutional Critique: Southern Epistemologies and the Reconfiguration of Institutional Debates’ granted by DG Creatività Contemporanea MiC of the Italian Ministry of Culture - Ministero della Cultura under the program (2026)

menegale

ualresearchsociety
Arts Students' Union

Image: Climate Companions Digest: A Collective Feast of ‘All Things Layered’ at R-Urban Poplar, 2022.

01/10/2026

Our current exhibition ‘Sensual / Mutual’ by Del LaGrace Volcano is open Thursday to Sunday, 12 – 5pm and runs until 25 October.⁠

‘Sensual / Mutual’, the first major institutional solo exhibition in the UK by Del LaGrace Volcano. Surfacing unseen bodies of work from the 1970s and 80s, the exhibition focuses on Volcano’s time in San Francisco and Santa Fe, tracing q***r, feminist, leather d**e, gender-variant, and land-based communities in the process of making themselves visible.

Del LaGrace Volcano

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photography: Mark Blower.

30/09/2026

Join us on 17 October at 2pm for curator Orlan Ohtonen and artist Del LaGrace Volcano in conversation. Ohtonen and Volcano will discuss Volcano’s current exhibition, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, which surfaces unseen photographs from the artist’s time in 1970s and 80s San Francisco and Santa Fe among leather d**es, gender-variant people and land-based communities. The talk will consider Volcano’s five-decade practice of embedded, collaborative image-making, its role in shaping q***r, trans and feminist visual culture, and what these histories of self-fashioning and collective life might offer to the present.

This event is generously supported by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.

Del LaGrace Volcano
Orlan Ohtonen
Finnish Institute UK & Ireland

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, courtesy of the artist.

Join us on 17 October at 2pm for curator Orlan Ohtonen and artist Del LaGrace Volcano in conversation. Ohtonen and Volcano will discuss Volcano’s current exhibition, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, which surfaces unseen photographs from the artist’s time in 1970s and 80s San Francisco and Santa Fe among leather d**es, gender-variant people and land-based communities. The talk will consider Volcano’s five-decade practice of embedded, collaborative image-making, its role in shaping q***r, trans and feminist visual culture, and what these histories of self-fashioning and collective life might offer to the present.

This event is generously supported by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.

Del LaGrace Volcano
Orlan Ohtonen
Finnish Institute UK & Ireland

Image: Orlan Ohtonen, Venla Helenius, 2025.

15/09/2026

Juliet Jacques reviews Del LaGrace Volcano’s solo exhibition ‘Sensual / Mutual’ at Auto Italia and sister exhibition ‘Love Bites Back’ at Edinburgh Arts Festival for Frieze.

“They appear very much of their time, documenting US d**e bars, a Le***an and Gay Freedom Day Parade, a radical feminist commune and an early 1990s British scene infused with punk, goth and biker subcultures. Yet in these two shows they feel contemporary, speaking to a strong need for politicized self-organization in the face of renewed oppression. These are images that were made primarily for the people in them: Volcano staged erotic photographs of their le***an communities, many of whom rejected heteronormative sexual dynamics, gender expressions and family systems.”

Del LaGrace Volcano
Frieze

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photography: Mark Blower.

10/09/2026

Join us on Thursday 8th October, 6 – 8pm, for ‘Edelweiss Pirates’, a collaborative workshop and installation series with artists Brutus Labiche and Ajahee Sekkm-Miles.

Responding to the rise of far-right rhetoric and the increasing use of national symbols to promote exclusionary ideas of identity and belonging, this session invites participants to reclaim and reinterpret national symbols through collage. Using UK tabloids, personal archives and the Auto Italia archive, participants will rework images and texts to create new interpretations of national symbols and narrative that question how national identity is represented.

The project takes its name from the ‘Edelweiss Pirates’, informal youth groups who resisted the rigidity of N**i ideology. Their refusal to conform, and their creation of their own rituals and forms of belonging, provides a starting point for the workshop, which considers how identity can be challenged and reimagined.

‘Edelweiss Pirates’ is an ongoing series in which each workshop becomes a temporary installation and contributes to a growing transnational archive. These workshops explore how identity is lived, constructed and redefined across communities and borders.

Originally developed in Switzerland, this will be the first Edelweiss Pirates workshop in the UK.

This event is free to attend and will take place at Auto Italia. To register, follow the link in our bio.

Ajahee Sekkm-Miles

09/09/2026

Dazed includes Del LaGrace Volcano’s solo exhibition ‘Sensual / Mutual’ at Auto Italia among their art shows to leave the house for in September 2026. Selected alongside ‘Japanese Women Photographers’ at The Photographers’ Gallery and ‘Jenkin van Zyl - Enclosure’ at Somerset House among others.⁠

The exhibition is on view until 25 October 2026 and is open Thursday to Sunday, 12–5pm. Free Entry.

Dazed
Del LaGrace Volcano

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, ‘Anahid, Zari & Colette, Goodman Building’, 1980.

08/09/2026

Finn Blythe interviews Del LaGrace Volcano about their solo exhibition ‘Sensual / Mutual’ for The Observer New Review, reflecting on their life spent documenting q***r lives, bodies and communities.

‘ “People in my work are heroes,” Volcano says. “We are looking back at you. We refuse to be pathologised. That makes the art world uncomfortable. They cannot consume us.” [...] People still write to say the photographs changed their lives: “It makes me cry every time.” ‘

Finn Blythe
The Observer New Review
Del LaGrace Volcano

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, ‘Scott’s Bar D***s, San Francisco’, 1980.

04/09/2026

Join us on the 24th September at 7:30pm for a conversation between Ezra-Lloyd Jackson and Amrita Dhallu, exploring how scent and sound carry memories of place and home.

This event emerges from Rose Nordin’s ongoing residency with Brighter Futures, a group of young migrants supported by Praxis and Kazzum Arts. In her residency, Rose is co-creating fragrances and creative materials with the group to examine how scent connects to identity and personal history.

Using Brighter Futures’ collaborative research as a starting point, Ezra and Amrita will share their own practices and discuss how multisensorial experiences evoke memory. Together, they will consider how personal histories link to wider narratives held within sites and materials, and how collective making opens up new ways of sharing these experiences.

The event is free to attend and will be held at Auto Italia. To book, follow the link in bio.

Ezra-Lloyd Jackson

Rose Nordin

Address

44 Bonner Road
London
E29JS

Opening Hours

Thursday	12pm - 5pm
Friday	12pm - 5pm
Saturday	12pm - 5pm
Sunday	12pm - 5pm

Telephone

+442089834115

Website

http://www.autoitaliasoutheast.org/

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