Broken Ecologies at Castlefield Gallery

Power, protest, memory and survival. These themes dominate the present moment, shaping public life in ways that feel increasingly close to home. Through large-scale print works, sculpture and film, Broken Ecologies reflects on these forces, as Alana Lake and Deeqa Ismail exhibit together for the first time.

Presented at Castlefield Gallery, the exhibition brings together two practices that are distinct in material language yet closely aligned in their political and historical concerns. The  exhibition was shaped with guest selector Cindy Sissokho, whose curatorial work spans institutions including KADIST, the Venice Biennale and the Wellcome Collection. The result is an exhibition rooted in contemporary conditions, responding directly to a present marked by war, censorship and the criminalisation of protest.

Printmaking forms the starting point for Deeqa Ismail, whose work explores speculative ecology, memory and the repetition of erased or hidden histories. Drawing on family archives and her investigation into what she describes as Somali culture’s ‘stuck-ness’, Ismail reflects on the experience of living within recurring histories and carrying them across generations. For Broken Ecologies, she presents a new series of large-scale woodblock prints, layering imagery, wood grain and cosmic textures. Imagining the carved surfaces as astral planes, figures to move through multiple worlds at once, forming thresholds between the living, the lost and those held in remembrance.

Alana Lake works with glass, marble, metal, concrete, wax and waste materials to explore compulsion, risk and the fragile architectures of contemporary life. Shaped by a working-class, post-industrial upbringing, she gravitates towards materials that carry social and emotional weight, tracing the connections between personal experience and broader contemporary conditions. In With Force (2025), a cast glass police truncheon, Lake reflects on shifting boundaries of state power, public voice and the right to assemble, while her marble baseball bat aligns contemporary violence with the material language of classical sculpture.

Devised alongside a public programme of screenings and performances, Broken Ecologies positions the gallery as an active site for dialogue around its themes, asking what it means to make – and encounter – art in times of crisis.