A bright blue book trolley (the kind you often find in libraries) greets you at the end of a short hallway, as you approach the ’Second Gallery’ at Eastside Projects in Birmingham. There are more familiar notes as you head inside: peeling antiquated wallpaper and old tablecloths, graffitied glassine bags, stacks of books and newspapers all lurking in shadowy spaces. Curator Lucy Grubb’s background as a librarian is felt throughout.
Birmingham has around 35 community libraries, providing more than just book lending. At a time of a bankrupt Birmingham City Council–leading to cuts to public services, rises in tax, and the selling off of assets– Grubb’s title for the exhibition offers further suggestions for how we can use our local library: […] a hostel for the homeless; a psychiatric ward; a crime scene; a study hall; a place of safety; a boxing ring; a confessional booth; a theatre space; a venture for knitting and book clubs; an information hub for people trying to find a long lost relative or a job. On most days, the library is all of these.
Despite being increasingly under threat, the library bridges many gaps, holding on as an elusive third place (in the context of sociology, a ‘third place’ refers to a community gathering space that’s neither a home nor a workplace). Japhet Dinganga’s ‘Tower Club’ (2025) is a monument: stacking together ingredients of bricks, books, newspaper, fabrics and wood. The repurposing of these materials opens them up to new forms of significance, whilst giving them a morphological quality. Images of British towns and local high streets can be pulled from the lace and patchwork fabrics embedded in the structure. The old wood isn’t withered or splintered, it has come from vintage school desks. As they diminish in our popular culture, these familiar ‘Britishisms’ can live on in the community through the library. Dinganga presents culture in an ongoing dialogue with public space, each slowly influencing the other. Here, the act of repurposing prevents stagnancy. Culture is able to be passed down and tailored to suit the needs of the current generation, making these spaces (and their materials) formative for communities.
This ongoing dialogue between place and material is further reflected in Dinganga’s work, also on display offsite, at the Central Library in Coventry. Commissioned from an informal but library-led brief, ‘Reflection Sink’ (2025) and ‘Tiffany’s Lobby’ (2025) are what the artist describes as ‘a memoir for what was and now is’, highlighting the Central Library’s past lives as The Locarno Ballroom and Tiffany’s Nightclub. Grubb facilitated conversations about changing spaces between librarians and the artist, looking through archives and inviting the local Coventry community to bring and show their own objects of memory. Outlines of concert tickets and venue blueprints are laser etched onto ‘Tiffany’s Lobby’ (2025), causing a dialogue between this reimagined nightclub sign and the ballroom’s ephemera. ‘Reflection Sink’ (2025) is fixed to a door underneath a fire exit sign, blocking the way: creating a space to pause, rest and reflect. Cities like Coventry and Birmingham experience much ‘redevelopment’ and in turn, impermanence. Experimenting with liminal places highlights the potential of our car parks, condemned and abandoned buildings, construction sites, sold off assets and thousands of empty homes. It reflects a sentiment Grubb expresses in the exhibition text: ‘when my bus ride becomes my studio / meant for waiting and standing but now holding / my stones.’ Dinganga’s works present culture and communities in a more disruptive dialogue with public space.
Back in Birmingham, at Eastside Projects, Motunrayo Akinola’s ‘Grandma’s (gl)ceiling’ (2023) hangs above you in the gallery covered with ‘Victorian-style’ wallpaper reminiscent of the artist’s childhood. Suspended above Dinganga’s towering sculpture’, the two together resemble a space undergoing refurbishment. The ceiling’s weight can almost be felt, maybe translated through the shadow it casts, or the way it obscures the space above it apart from a squarish hole in the ceiling. Akinola’s practice, concerned with access, belonging and historical imagery, paints the spotlit hole as a puncture for light rays of ‘HOPE’ (2023) to pass through. This gap in the ceiling is uneven, surrounded by ripped wallpaper and has been sealed with a rudimentary, peeling tape. Akinola’s work implies that we must actively engage with tentative environments to change them. Both the Birmingham Loves Libraries umbrella campaign to champion and protect libraries and the protest anthology Brum Library Zine have punctured the city council’s recent attempts to close community libraries. This disruptive dialogue challenges the status quo, presenting examples for others to do the same. The exhibition text elaborates: ‘it’s not about what the space is, or what it was, but about what it could become, and that’s the echo we return to.’ The wallpaper may be ‘Victorian’, but it is also Grandma’s.
Jessie Tam’s ‘It Has to Be Apart/It Has to Be Alone’ (2022) asks us how we can transform objects to reclaim and preserve them. Her exploration into unwanted household fragments mirror how community spaces are undervalued in a neoliberal society. Inspired by her Aunt’s now-demolished home in Hong Kong, Tam’s work cuts nine abandoned items in half to commemorate their missing pasts and reach for their missing futures–the most striking of these being her plaster eyeballs. A wall of sketched-on glassine bags builds new lore for these objects–complementing the repurposed fragments in Dinganga’s ‘Tower Club’ (2025).
Found on the book trolley, Tam’s booklet ‘Struggling Artists: a melancholic displacement’ (2025) also cuts itself into textual fragments including a storybook, a letter, a screenplay and a diary–all holding together pieces of the artist’s past. A newspaper clipping lists some fragments that can be found in the library: food bank services, English language lessons, visa processing, and NHS health checks. Evidently, fragments can represent scattered experiences, varied people, layers of memory and the repetitive mundane. They are not necessarily luxurious or commodifiable, but Tam preserves them anyway, anointing them with new connotations.
Curator Lucy Grubb and exhibiting artists Japhet Dinganga, Montunrayo Akinola and Jessie Tam unearth a familiar world to offer their commentary on our public spaces. Ultimately, a library is many things, including a formative space and community focal point. These spaces are not always shiny and exclusive, nor are they money-makers, but what they are, we can and must survive within.
Japhet Dinganga, Jessie Tam, Motunrayo Akinola: […] a hostel for the homeless; a psychiatric ward; a crime scene; a study hall; a place of safety; a boxing ring; a confessional booth; a theatre space; a venture for knitting and book clubs; an information hub for people trying to find a long lost relative or a job. On most days, the library is all of these., Eastside Projects, Birmingham, 8 March – 5 July 2025.
Jaz Morrison is a multidisciplinary writer and artist-curator based in Birmingham.
This review is supported by Eastside Projects.
Published 09.06.2025 by Kevin Hunt in Review
1,201 words