OpenHand OpenSpace

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We are pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition at 571 Gallery as part of Reading’s ‘Heritage Week’

This year our annual ‘Members Show’ will be a joint exhibition with Jelly Associate Artists. We are very much looking forward to showing alongside this amazing group, for the first time.

We will also be opening up our doors for studio tours where you can visit the studios and chat to the artists who currently occupy them. All are welcome!

Please see dates below and we look forward to seeing you.

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‘THE KEEP’

An exhibition of OHOS & Jelly Studio Artists & Members.

Exhibition:
12th - 20th September / 10-4pm

Opening (all welcome):
12th September / 12-4pm

Open Studios:
12th September / 1-4pm
13th September / 10-4pm
PLEASE NOTE: TOURS WILL HAPPEN ON THE HOUR ONLY

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Poster Design by THE ENGINE ROOM DESIGNS The Engine Room

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jelly

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From the OHOS Archives:

Early 90’s

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A couple of posters announcing ‘Open Studios’, featuring the artists who were studio members at that time.

Images 5-14:
Scans from A4 print outs from photographs that documented some of the work by the resident artists during these ‘Open Studios’ events.

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We are currently digitising our physical archive to share with you and to highlight the extraordinary eclectic mix of artists who have occupied OHOS throughout its history (see image 3 for backstory, which was printed on the reverse side of the poster in Image 2). Our thanks go to those who kept all the flyers and documentation.

We will be announcing an Open Studios event happening in September this year during ‘ Heritage Week’ where we will also have a Members Show and a group show with Jelly, Reading.

jelly

You’re invited to UNBOXING - a participatory event taking place as part of the Engine Room’s Blood Sweat and Tears exhibition.

Alona Karavai, visiting Reading from Kyiv, will open a box of artworks by Ukrainian artists — unpacking each piece together with the audience and building an improvised exhibition in real time.

Works by: Yulia Bondar, Yaroslav Futymskyi, INAKSHE, Nikolay Karabinovych, Anna Nykytiuk, Anna Potiomkina, Ksenia Pohrebennyk, Hanna Trofimova & Stanislav Turina.

unboxing explores the complex, conflicting experiences of war and crisis — migration, broken ties and broken plans, shifted ideologies, vulnerable landscapes and fragile memories. It sits with post-traumatic growth that sometimes cannot keep up with the pace of ongoing events. Sometimes heavy, sometimes funny, always deeply human.

This is also an act of imagination — an attempt to find a different way to meet art and each other on equal terms, away from the sterile isolation of conventional exhibition spaces. A more intimate form of curation, where all involved interpret side-by-side instead of in-front-of. When artists cannot travel, a simple box still can.

White gloves provided. Curiosity required.

📅 Friday 28 June 2026
🕒 14:00–18:00
📍 571 Oxford Road, Reading RG30 1HL
🚌 Easy to reach from Reading town centre & station

OpenHand OpenSpace

The Engine Room

You are so welcome to join The Engine Room to celebrate their 10th year spinning around the planet.

To mark this moment, join us to delve deep into the archive-of new work, of process, and of ideas not yet dreamt up. It will be both retrospective and speculative: a space to reflect, and a space to imagine forward.

The programme will unfold across a series of shared experiences. We will hold feasts, we will dance, we will plant seeds in an inch of soil.
Drawing rooms will open as intimate spaces for conversation and collective thinking-places where ideas can be sketched, tested, and held in common.

This is both a reflection and a provocation: an invitation to honour the labour, creativity, and collective energy that have brought us here—and to imagine what comes next.

This is part of the Open For Art Festival programme. To see full listings jelly

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From the OHOS Archives:

Early 1990’s

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Rosy Martin (& Jo Spence)
‘Phototherapy, Memory and Identity. Opening up the family album. An experimental approach.’

A Phototherapy Workshop at Open Space

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Rosy Martin is a London-based artist, psychological-therapist, workshop leader, and writer. Across her art, group work, and therapeutic practice she explores the relationships between photography, memory, identities and unconscious processes. In collaboration with the late Jo Spence, in 1983 she developed the feminist practice of phototherapy, incorporating re-enactments to explore the psychic and social construction of identities within the drama of the everyday. Exhibiting internationally and publishing widely since 1985, Martin investigates issues including gender, sexualities, ageing, class, location, dress, shame, loss, grief and reparation. Her photographic series ‘Transforming the suit: what does a le***an look like?’ (1987), exhibited as part of ‘Women and Revolt’ (Tate Britain, 2023-2024) revisits historical and contemporary tropes of identity to challenge and play with stereotypical assumptions.

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We are currently digitising our archive to share with you and to highlight the extraordinary calibre of events that have occurred at OHOS throughout its history. Our thanks go to those who kept all the flyers and documentation.

Help us save OHOS and protect Brock Keep! Sign our petition to show your support and help protect this vital part of Reading’s cultural identity.
Link in Bio to take action!

Apply to join us.

New affordable creative work space available now.

We have a single studio space of approx. 16 square metres, available from 1 June 2026. The studio has 24/7 access and costs £82.80pcm. Joining our studio community involves helping with the day to day running of the building and joining the charity’s activities for public benefit.

Open Hand Open Space (OHOS) currently provides ten artists studios, operates a public art gallery/project space and enjoys the support of a diverse community of associate artists and trustees.

The available studio is on the first floor of our studio building at 571 Oxford Road, Reading. All OHOS studios are in a shared building and include circulation space, which other artists can pass through to access their own spaces. Brock Keep is a publicly owned building and as such is occasionally open for visitors and open studio events.

If you’d like to join us, please email your application [email protected] by 30th May 2026.

For guidance on writing your application, please visit the link on our website, through our Linktree link in our bio 🔗

There will be an opportunity to view the studio on the 25th and 30th of May 2026. More details to be confirmed.

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From the OHOS Archives:

1991-1993

A5 Flyers mainly designed by Marcus Cole, for a series of talks & presentations at OHOS by the following artists / photographers.

Images 1&2:
David A Bailey

Images 3&4:
Helen Escobedo

Image 5:
David Hevey

Images 6&7:
Chila Kumari Burman
(talk given by Veena Stephenson, due to illness)

Image 8:
Tom Mulligan

Images 9 & 10:
Bipinchandra J Mistry & Santoshni Perera
(Exhibition flyer including an announcement of an informal debate, chaired by Mark Sealy)

Blood, Sweat & Tears

19.6.2026 - 28.6.2026



As part of Open For Art 2026

This year The Engine Room turns 10 on 2.7.2026

To mark this moment, join us to delve deep into our archive—of new work, of process, and of ideas not yet dreamt up. It will be both retrospective and speculative: a space to reflect, and a space to imagine forward.

The programme will unfold across a series of shared experiences. We will hold feasts, we will dance, we will plant seeds in an inch of soil.

Drawing rooms will open as intimate spaces for conversation and collective thinking—places where ideas can be sketched, tested, and held in common.

This is both a reflection and a provocation: an invitation to honour the labour, creativity, and collective energy that have brought us here—and to imagine what comes next.

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From the OHOS Archives:

From 1992

Danica Jojich

‘ARMED TO BE ALLOWED’.

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‘Danica Jojich’s travels in Serbia, where she met both her parents’ families and experienced life there through her relatives, left an indelible mark on her which continues to impress itself in her artwork. Jojich dedicates her works to people she cares for, introducing a very personal narrative into each installation. She uses common, everyday objects like clothes racks, pillows, newspapers, linen, and felt to present socio-political topics within a context familiar to the viewer. Despite the comfortable atmosphere created by “home-made” objects, Jojich asks the viewer to examine the way they look and understand these objects. Larger issues such as family, immigration, war and feminism can be found embedded in her manipulation of this material. The personal speaks of the political in her art. In her wearable pieces, from her Armed to be Allowed (1990) series, the domestic narrative is purposely interwoven with the political one, opening up unlimited identifications and associations both private and public.’

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From the OHOS Archives…

Images 1-5:
Graphics & Posters for a series of ‘Open Studio’ events during 1989 and 1990 featuring the studio members from this time

Image6:
At the back of the archive there includes this list of studio artists outlining their diverse and eclectic backgrounds

Images 7&8:
Some documentation. There seems to be little in terms of actual work from this time; more-so a record of how information was disseminated through the almost forgotten art of flyer and poster design. Most of these are printed out on A3 and at the time I’m sure it wasn’t predicted that a domestic scanner would be A4 (hence the misaligned efforts to stitch them together digitally).