New Castlefield Gallery Associates exhibition announced
Posted on 21 October 2025
We are proud to announce that Deeqa Ismail and Alana Lake’s exhibition Broken Ecologies has been selected to be our next Castlefield Gallery Associates exhibition.
The proposal was co-selected by guest selector, Curator, Cultural Producer, Art Consultant & Writer Cindy Sissokho and Castlefield Gallery’s Head of Programmes, Matthew Pendergast.
Broken Ecologies will open in March 2026. It is the first collaborative project between Alana Lake and Deeqa Ismail. Through large-scale print works, sound, installation, and a series of sculptures and glass works, the exhibition reflects on systems of power, protest, memory, and survival. It invites audiences into unsettled spaces and to consider how histories of erasure and survival continue to shape the present, especially in a moment marked by war, censorship, and the criminalisation of protest.
Against a backdrop of climate crisis, social inequality, political unrest, and the erosion of human rights, the proposed exhibition asks: what is the role of the artist in times of crisis?Deeqa Ismail and Alana Lake
A public programme of screenings, performances and readings will use the exhibition as a place to gather. This programme of events will move the work into something more collective – spaces of refusal, care, and shared experience. It is within this spirit that the exhibition itself takes shape, staging dialogue through materials, gestures, and forms; connecting artists, communities, and a diverse range of audiences.
More about Deeqa Ismail
Deeqa Ismail (b. 1988, Hargeisa, Somalia) is a Somali-British artist based in Stockport, Manchester. She works with printmaking, sound, video, and installations, often incorporating analogue processes and Somali sonic archives. Printmaking frequently acts as the starting point in her work, and her practice explores speculative ecology, memory, and the repetition of erased or hidden histories. Drawing on family archives and Somali cultures’ “stuck-ness,” Ismail reflects on the feeling of living within recurring histories and carrying them across generations.
Her work explores both shared and personal experiences of hybrid identity and the in-between spaces. Through film, prints, sculpture, and sound, she creates spaces for reflection and imagination. Her practice reveals how hidden systems of colonialism connect with normalised crises, often drawing inspiration from nomadic traditions throughout her work.
Ismail’s engagement with time, ghosts and aliens informs her work and installations, which function as openings into reconstructed worlds.
Recent exhibitions include How to be in the Future, Salon for a Speculative Future (SFASF), Chisenhale Art Place, London; checked out at Wilko, Sheffield; Numbi Fest at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Future Practice Research Symposium, Manchester Metropolitan University; Srishti at Hot Bed Press, Manchester; and The Mirror at Night, curated by Peter Suchin, at Cross Lane Projects, London.
More about Alana Lake
Alana Lake (b. 1981, Tamworth, UK) is an artist working at the intersection of addiction, desire, and materiality. Currently part of the Yorkshire Sculpture Network 2025, she works with glass, ceramic, and metal, drawing on material histories and inherited associations to explore compulsion, intimacy, and transformation. Informed by a working-class, post-industrial background, her practice often reflects repetitive and ritualised behaviours. Lake’s research engages theories of lively and animated matter, gravitating toward materials that carry tension to consider how craving, care, and self-destructive habits take form. Her PhD, Towards a Pathology of Desire (Manchester School of Art), examines addiction not as disease but as a “biology of desire,” deeply entangled with contemporary culture. Through her practice, she critiques the fetishisation of substances and objects, exploring how they are ritualised, aestheticised, and invested with symbolic weight in both personal and collective experience. Awards include DYCP, Arts Council England (2024); Andrew Stewart Artist Award (2023); Research Scholarship, Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa (2022); Studio Funding Award, BBK (2021); NEUSTART Stipendium, Deutscher Künstlerbund (2021); Project Space Award, Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa (2018); Dunoyer de Segonzac Award (RA, 2009); and Michael Moser Award (RA, 2008).
Broken Ecologies is supported with funding from The Fenton Arts Trust and The Haworth Trust.
Images
Banner:
- Deeqa Ismail, Aqal Hijab, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist
From left to right, top to bottom:
- Alana Lake, Fallout, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist
- Deeqa Ismail, Tempo, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist
- Deeqa Ismail. Image courtesy of the artist
- Alana Lake, Portrait, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist
- Deeqa Ismail, Aqal Hijab, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist
- Alana Lake, Fallout, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist
