Haroun Hayward in Bridging Landscapes II at Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery, UK

Haroun Hayward, Isotonik (Thistle and Sun), 2024 will be included in Bridging Landscapes II at Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery presented as part of the Platforma Festival, produced by Counterpoints Arts.

 

Opening 4 October through 1 November 2025, the group exhibition features South Asian and MENA artists from across the UK. The exhibition explores the emotional and cultural impact of migration—whether through lived or inherited experience—and the deep, diasporic threads that shape memory, identity, and belonging.

 

Hayward’s paintings are a celebration of hybridity, harmoniously converging art historical and musical references with distinct modes of making. The paintings honor what informs Hayward’s personal and artistic narrative - rave culture, abstract expressionism, post war British landscape painting and his mother’s textile collection

 

Isotonik (Thistle and Sun), 2024 refers to Isotonik, the moniker for DJ Chris Paul who is cited with bringing acid house to the masses in the UK in the 1990s. The bottom left part of the painting has two rectangles with cut out chevrons, the unusual fragment nods to the avant-garde movement of vorticism. In this area of painterly flourish, Hayward reimagines a 1940s work, Thistles and Sun by Graham Sutherland. In Hayward’s own versions of quintessential British landscapes, the small scale and great level of detail speaks to his training in Indo-Persian miniature painting. Emulating embroidery, the bottom right section is delicately textured paint. The pattern is from a Shrine flag (‘alam or nishan)’ from Uttar Pradesh, c.1896-1910, which Hayward sourced from the tome, ‘The Fabric of India’ ed. Rosmary Crill (2015).