About Us
Cell Project Space is a non-profit gallery and artist studios founded in 1999. The gallery was originally set up as an artist-run space and formed a registered charity, Cell Foundation, in 2014. Throughout the 24-year history of the organisation, Cell Studios has provided affordable workspace for artists, which in turn supports the gallery’s ongoing programme of exhibitions, and events.
Gallery Team:
Milika Muritu: Co-founder & Gallery Director
Annabelle Mödlinger: Gallery Production
Sheila Lawson: Website and Online Developer
Michelle L Johnson: Gallery Assistant
Finbar Prior: Gallery Production
Studios Team:
Rosie Joyce: Head of Studios Operations
Sean Synnuck: Studios Co-ordinator
Andi Amirshah: Studios Maintenance
Linas Develis: Studios Buildings Maintenance Technician
Richard Priestley: Co-founder/ Finance & Studios Director
The Gallery
Cell Project Space is a contemporary art space dedicated to supporting emerging, mid-career and underrepresented voices in British and international contemporary art. Founded in 1999 and located in Bethnal Green, East London, Cell Project Space has since become known for its artist-centric focus and acts as a testing site for experimental exhibitions, new artistic production, and tailored public programmes, fostering meaningful engagements between art practitioners, and the wider public.
Our Mission and History
Cell Project Space was established as an artist-run gallery with a commitment to providing an accessible space for artists to experiment and engage in critical discourse. In 2014, this mission was formalised by registering as a charity, Cell Foundation, enabling us to amplify our support for the arts. Cell Studios, founded concurrently, provides affordable workspaces for artists and has grown to encompass a wide community of creatives across London. The income generated from Cell Studios directly sustains the gallery’s operations, supporting an ongoing programme of exhibitions, outreach, and public events, enabling Cell Project Space to operate sustainably and independently.
Through its sustainable funding model, Cell Project Space plays a unique position between an artist-run space and a public institution, enabling us to offer artists resources and artistic freedom to realise ambitious new projects. Over the years, Cell has become internationally acclaimed in the field of contemporary art, with a reputation for presenting projects that resist dominant narratives and highlight under-known artistic practices.
Exhibitions and Programmes
Our 2025 programme brought together research, exhibitions and workshops to examine how artistic practices responded to systems of production, memory, and exchange across different contexts.
At its core, Untamed Assemblies anchored the year with a research-led investigation into experimental fashion and art in 1990s Eastern Europe, reconstructing overlooked histories of collective practice which has continued to be traced in an expanded project, Untamed Assembly: Backstage of Utopia at the 2026, 61st Venice Biennale, for the Latvian Pavilion. This project mapped the foundational work made in the Central and Eastern European Diasporic (CEED) Feminisms.
Running alongside this, Daydreamers by Majd Abdel Hamid shifted the focus to time, labour, and memory, using embroidery to explore slowness and resistance; its finissage, dot to dot, performed by Paul Noble created a notable intergenerational connection through sound and storytelling.
Questions of how meaning was produced were extended in Produced by –1, plus One, where Tanja Widmann (with Johannes Porsch) treated the gallery itself as a system that generated authorship and value. The programme completed with Fortunate by Ruoru Mou, as she expanded the programme’s scope to material circulation and global economies, interrogating how value is constructed through industrial processes and luxury aesthetics.
Across the year, a key through-line emerged: art as a set of processes—temporal, institutional, and material—through which value, history, and subjectivity were continuously made and contested, to set a path for the programme ahead.
Community Engagement
Cell Project Space is committed to fostering emerging talent and meaningful community engagement. In 2025 we continued to develop our Student Trainee initiative, recruiting two Trainee Producers, Varvara Uhlik and Sam Stewart, supported by Art Fund. This programme is designed to provide early-career artists and curators with sustained professional development, combining practical experience, curatorial agency, and mentorship.
Within this framework, the Trainee Producers take an active role in shaping and delivering public-facing programming. They devised and led The Looms Workshop in collaboration with Blackhorse Activators, engaging participants aged 16–25 in a series of embroidery and needlework sessions responding to the exhibition. Drawing on Abdel Hamid’s focus on time, slowness, and imaginative resistance, the workshops created space for reflection, skill-sharing, and collective making.
Extending this approach, the Trainees initiated a collaboration with the Goldsmiths Art Writing Group, for A Slow Roasted Subject, And A Lengthy Buffet facilitating an exploration of collective writing through repetition and variation, inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Participants developed texts in response to Tanja Widmann & Johannes Porsch’s exhibition, which were subsequently installed throughout the gallery. This created an active feedback loop between artwork, interpretation, and audience, foregrounding writing as a live and participatory form.
The Trainee Producers programme reflects our commitment to accessibility, representation, and co-creation. By positioning emerging practitioners as collaborators and leaders, the programme supports underrepresented voices to test ideas, work directly with peers and younger participants, and contribute to the development of our artistic programme.
Through partnerships with community organisations, educational institutions, and grassroots collectives, Cell Project Space extends its activity beyond the gallery walls. This networked approach strengthens our role as a locally embedded and socially responsive organisation, while building sustainable pathways into the arts for the next generation.
Legacy
Throughout our history, Cell Project Space has been a launching pad for numerous artists who have since gained international recognition. Notable alumni include Coumba Samba, Olu Ogunnaike, Cudelice Brazelton IV, Céline Condorelli, Ghislaine Leung(Turner Prize 2023 finalist), and Mimosa Echard (Duchamp Prize winner), who held their first solo exhibitions at Cell Project Space.
We foster critical and conceptual thinking, supporting work that questions assumptions and challenges dominant narratives, inviting audiences to think with art, embracing complexity, dialogue, and new ways of understanding. Through exhibitions rooted in lived experience, we explore race, gender, neurodivergence, and power—centering perspectives often marginalized or overlooked this includes solo projects with Nicola Frimpong, Peng Zuqiang, Adham Faramawy, and Nina Cristante as well as curated critical pairings with Alex Margo Arden & Caspar Heinemann, Eglė Kulbokaitė & Dorota Gawęda, Jenna Bliss & Gili Tal, Rosa Aiello & Patricia L. Boyd, as well as Agnė Jokšė and Anastasia Sosunova.
Our legacy includes pivotal past programmes such as Civic Duty, featuring Donald Rodney’s pioneering work Psalms, X6 Dance Space (1976–80): Liberation Notes, which celebrated the groundbreaking X6 Dance Collective and The Poetry set by Barbara T. Smith. These exhibitions reflect our commitment to spotlighting significant yet often overlooked artists, and themes, allowing us to engage with both historical and contemporary narratives that are essential to understanding and questioning our cultural landscape.
Cell Project Space Gallery is a registered artistic and educational charity: Cell Foundation; Charity no. 1156554.
Cell Project Space is accessed through an industrial yard in Bethnal Green via an entryway brimming with sub-tropical plants.
Visit the website's Studios pages to find out more about Cell Studios.
Our Organisational Commitments and Policies
The two organisations, Cell Project Space Ltd (a private company limited by guarantee without share capital, operating on a not-for-profit basis) and Cell Foundation Charity (a registered charity), work collaboratively within the framework of UK company and charity law to uphold and deliver their shared Policies and Objectives. To Learn more about how we work and our oganisational commitments please visit our Policies Pages HERE