‘Their Theatre and Ours’ – Joey Simons

October 27, 2025 2:49 pm

Join us on Thursday 30th October from 6-9pm for the opening of Joey Simons’ solo exhibition Their Theatre and Ours – open throughout November at Market Gallery.

Situated within the history of the workers’ theatre movement, Their Theatre and Ours examines what it may mean to act in the midst of an inferno.

The exhibition plays with the forms & methods of long-dead movements to rehearse the creation of a workers’ theatre and question if such a possibility remains today. Drawing on practices of amateur translation and performance to connect ideas across language and time, Their Theatre and Ours is an open-ended investigation into the politics of the theatrical and the real.

Opening times:

30th Oct to 23rd November

Thurs to Sunday 11am to 4pm

Joey Simons is an artist and writer working across video, theatre, research, publishing and community arts to explore the traditions and contradictions of the city’s militant political cultures. Through reconfigurations of worker-poets, communist opera-goers, street orators and autodidacts, dead and alive, new forms of immanent critique may emerge from the wreckage of defeat.

A wooden table with several old sheets of paper laid out as well as a golden candle holder and a potted plant. The table is next to a red wall.

An old crt tv playing a film over a plinth covered with red fabric. On the right side of the image there is a big street facing window and behind the tv a handwritten mural with red letters.

Two red fabric banners hung up on a white wall with the words 'plunge into' and 'terrible readings' written in white. In between the banners there is a bundle of canes and just in front there are two old chairs placed on top of a Persian style carpet.

A close up of a crt tv playing a film with 6 people reading a play. The tv is standing on a plinth covered with red fabric and on the right side of the plinth a pair of headphones are hanging.

Photographs by Erika Stevenson