Our Autumn exhibition for 2026 brings Joy Gregory’s first major survey show to Arnolfini. Spanning four decades, this landmark exhibition brings together over 250 works encompassing photography, film, installation and textiles, all of which showcase and celebrate Gregory’s inventive, culturally resonant and materially rich practice. Since the early 1980s Gregory (b.1959, UK), winner of the eighth annual Freelands Award and one of the UK’s most innovative artists working with photography today has been a pioneering force in contemporary photography, playing a critical role in its development nationally and internationally.
Gregory’s work explores identity, history, race, gender and societal ideals of beauty, while expanding photography’s aesthetic and material possibilities, encompassing Victorian photographic techniques such as cyanotypes and kallitypes, as well as digital media and performance, inviting important reflections on power structures, representation and cultural memory. Catching Flies with Honey includes pivotal self-portrait series’ such as Autoportrait (1990), alongside explorations of beauty and gender in The Handbag Project (1998–present) and Girl Thing (2002–2004); works originating from Gregory’s many journeys across Sri Lanka, the Caribbean and Europe; her playful and piercing meditation on racialised standards of beauty in The Blonde (1997–2010), and the expansive multimedia work Memory and Skin (1998) – which Gregory has described as a ‘story-telling space for the past, present and future; the personal and political’ – and her newly commissioned film, shot in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa (part of a 20 year-long collaboration with the indigenous community whose ancestors spoke the now-moribund language of N|uu).
The exhibition is organised by Whitechapel Gallery, London, with Arnolfini, Bristol. Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey has been generously supported by Freelands Foundation. The exhibition is part of Bristol Photo Festival 2026.
Bristol Photo Festival is an international biennial of contemporary photography. We organise a programme of exhibitions, talks and workshops, bringing together leading photographic voices from across the world. Alongside this work, we develop long-term projects in collaboration with local communities. Our mission is to present nuanced and unexpected stories that foster greater understanding of shared pasts, presents and futures. Our work is internationally focussed yet locally grounded, built from the urgencies of our city and its inhabitants. As a platform, we support artists to experiment, creating work that breaks with convention, exploring the possibilities of photography as a political tool today.
Our second edition (2024) drew over 115,000 visitors, with 14 exhibitions staged across the city’s museums, galleries and independent spaces. The third edition (Opening Week 14-18 October 2026) will be titled TIME MACHINE, showcasing photographic works that help us to experience the present as a place where past and future collide, shaping how we understand and interpret the world around us.
Bristol Photo Festival is managed, curated and produced by IC Visual Lab (ICVL), an independent visual arts organisation based in Bristol (UK).
Image credit: Autoportrait, Joy Gregory, 1989 – 1990 Silver Gelatin Lith Print © 2025 Joy Gregory. All rights reserved, DACS.
About the Artist
Joy Gregory
Joy Gregory is a graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. She has developed a practice which is concerned with social and political issues with reference to…
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