Nationhood: Memory and Hope @ Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

Nationhood: Memory and Hope brings together Ethiopian artist Aïda Muluneh, making work in Europe for the first time, with seven emerging UK photographers across England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. On tour as part of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, the exhibition asks what nationhood might mean when felt through what people carry. 

Across two rooms, photographs accumulate. Bodies painted in saturated primaries, faces in soft black and white, landscapes reread through symbol and what lingers. The works weave in and out, creating rhythms between, documenting a way of feeling community through pulse. 

Artists Roz Doherty, Shaun Connell, Chad Alexander, Grace Springer, Robin Chaddah-Duke, Miriam Ali and Haneen Hadiy each work in their own register, creating portraits that refuse singular readings of place or belonging. Muluneh's The Necessity of Seeing makes colour carry what language can’t. Figures adorned in geometric primaries stand against architecture and terrain that carry their own histories, the paint transforms surface, body into a carrier of memory. Colour insists against built environments with layered pasts, making visible the overlooked. Her black and white portraits, A Portrait of Us, work differently. Grassroots workers, organisers, faces holding generations of knowledge. The portraits let you sit with each person, with what their presence holds. These are people who shape their worlds quietly, whose work resonates beyond headlines. 

Syma by Miriam Ali, courtesy Impressions Gallery and Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture

Roz Doherty's youth portraits hold Bradford’s young people in bold colour, faces carrying futures not yet fixed. Shaun Connell photographs Bradford's Jamaican and Christian communities, faith as thread connecting generations. Chad Alexander documents the Tropicana Club in Dungannon, where an Irish Foresters hall became a multicultural gathering space. The work traces how spaces transform, how walls absorb decades of use and reinvention. Grace Springer's portraits from Cardiff surge with energy, the people actively reshaping their neighborhoods. Robin Chaddah-Duke recreates a late 1970s group portrait from The Parade community centre, reuniting original members decades later. Time collapses in the frame, then becomes now, continuity made visible. Miriam Ali turns her lens to Glasgow's grassroots workers, the hands that tend and connect, that make the city breathe. Haneen Hadiy finds Islamic symbolism in Scottish landscapes, rolling hills reread through faith, through ways of knowing place that aren’t written in stone or soil. 

Moving through the rooms, resonances emerge. A painted figure beside a documentary portrait. Doherty's vibrant youth meeting Chaddah-Duke's elders, who've been working for decades. Alexander's transformed spaces alongside Muluneh's bodies reshaping place through colour. Hadiy's symbolic landscapes in conversation with Connell's photography of devotion and lineage. 

From the series Scotland Through Her Eyes by Haneen Hadiy, courtesy Impressions Gallery and Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture

The exhibition operates through weaving, threads that have tangled and emerge, each one leading deeper into what’s been held. Memory is something you wear, reshape and use to claim what comes next – all insisting that how we see place, how we understand belonging, remains ongoing, unfinished. 

What stays with you isn't a single idea but the vibrations between photographs, the way they breathe together across different time(s) and stories. The work doesn't resolve. It layers, creating constellations that shift depending on where you stand, what you bring to the seeing. Nationhood: Memory and Hope offers no singular reading, but openings, spaces where multiple pasts, multiple futures can exist without collapsing the multiplicity that hums beneath.

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Nationhood: Memory and Hope, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, until 8 Feb