
Event
Summer Festival: Bubbling

3–9pm Free admission Booking required Full programme and detailed timing will be announced by mid-July.
YDP is excited to announce the inaugural summer festival, Bubbling, a convivial gathering celebrating embodied practices. The festival foregrounds how the slow fermentation of micro-actions can catalyse profound social change. Taking place at the height of summer—when the hot weather makes fermentation bubble with the most vigour—participatory performances, workshops and interactive installations by eleven artists and collectives will take place across the YDP building and Bedford Square Gardens.
Come taste summer leaves, feel your body like a tree trunk, dance with soil and listen to whispers and a chorus alike. Together, we turn our awareness to the joy of embodied connections, while also holding space for their complexity and fragility.
Full programme and detailed timing will be announced by mid-July.
Curated by YDP curator Erin Li.
Header image: Summer Festival: Bubbling, programme visual, design by Studio Plan B.
About the Artists
Jumana Emil Abboud’s creative practice explores memory, loss, and resilience across multiple strands, among them the Water Diviners project, which has seen activations in Palestine, Kassel, Dubai, New York, North Wales, London and Al Ahsa.
She has presented at major venues that included the Jameel Arts Centre, Cample Line, Documenta 15, TAVROS, Seoul Museum of Art, Darat al Funun, Bildmuseet, BALTIC, and the Biennales of Diriyah, Sydney, Venice, Qalandiya, Istanbul and Sharjah. Recognitions include the Jameel Fellowship at the Victoria & Albert Museum and shortlisting for Joan Miró and Artes Mundi 11 prizes. Abboud holds a PhD in Fine Art and is based in London.
A multidisciplinary artist, Mohammad Alfaraj (b. 1993, Al Hasa) develops a practice that blends writing, video, photography, drawing and sculpture from the Al Ahsa oasis, where he lives and works. Steeped in the oral traditions of Saudi Arabia, the artist draws inspiration from social practices, urban or rural architectures, and narratives of daily life to explore the relationships between humans and nature. His works often take the form of poetic fables that question contemporary ecological, social, and cultural issues.
Michele Chu (b. 1994, Hong Kong) lives and works in Hong Kong. Her practice explores intimacy and human connection, specifically the interplay between sensory elements and space to amplify emotional connection between individuals. Her works contemplate what makes us human, through mediums like performances, sculptures, multi-sensory installations and public interventions amongst others.
Her work has been shown at MACA (Beijing); Aranya Art Center (Qinghuangdao); Para Site (Hong Kong); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong); Delfina Foundation at Young Space (London); and 1a space (Hong Kong). Her debut solo exhibition at PHD Group, 'you, trickling', was featured in The New York Times, Artforum, ArtReview Asia, Frieze, Ocula, and other publications.
Imogen Kwok (b. 1991, Sydney) is driven by a particular tension: food is chaos. Natural, beautiful chaos. Working at the intersection of cuisine, craft and material thinking, she applies the same rigour to food that you would metal, glass or fabric—while embracing the fact that everything she makes will eventually melt, bruise, oxidise or, of course, be eaten.
Food is unpredictable, irregular, constantly changing; it refuses to sit still. Rather than trying to eliminate this disorder, Imogen works within it. Through cooking, she creates moments of stillness inside inherent unruliness, finding beauty before the first bite, taste and touch.
Imogen was born in 1991 in Sydney, raised in NYC, currently lives in London and works internationally.
Yoojin Lee (b. Seoul) works across and in-between performance, installation, text, sound and video to embody ways of becoming and knowing. Her work engages with quiet, less noticed but persistent forms of resistance and relating that unfold through multiple temporalities, such as sleep, slowness and symbiosis. She sleeps in London.
Monya Riachi is an interdisciplinary artist from Lebanon. Her practice is led by materials and contextual research, and interlaces politics, poetry and affect. Her works approach matter as a site of narrative, movement and transformation, and entangle the political geographies of her home and adopted countries, Lebanon and Britain. She collaborates with musicians, craftspeople, writers, geologists, materials scientists and philosophers in the research and making of her work, often realised through sculpture, installation, writing and performance.
Monya holds an MFA from Glasgow School of Art. She was selected for the Sharjah Art Foundation Residency (2026) and was awarded the Lewisham Arthouse Postgraduate Award (2024) and the Boghossian Foundation Visual Arts Prize (2024). Previous residencies include Lewisham Arthouse (London, 2024), Cove Park (Scotland, 2023) and Ashkal Alwan (Lebanon, 2022). Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Lebanon and Italy, with solo presentations across London and Glasgow.
Savannah Theis (b. Siegburg) is a London-based artist and facilitator exploring sense-making at the intersection of bodily experience, collective dynamics, and social contexts. Devising and drawing on improvisational tools from fields including group dialogue, drawing, choreography, somatic practices, and the healing arts, she develops perception exercises engaging with ways different forms of sensorial attention alter how we relate to ourselves, one another and our worlds. Often collaborating and co-creating settings for participation, she is interested in communal learning processes and the conditions facilitating how we speak, listen, move and make sense together.
Kaixiang Zhang (b. 2001, Wenzhou) explores the threshold between the manifestation and dissipation of matter. His practice captures the subtle dialogues between the mutable, ranging from the tidal rhythms of the Thames and the silken architecture of spiders, to the river of his childhood. For Kaixiang, social engagement is a ritual of togetherness. He uses food as an intimate language to build connections, hosting communal gatherings with friends at venues including MACA Art Centre (Beijing), Tiderip Gallery (London), and APT Gallery (London).
RESOLVE (est. 2016, London) is an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. They have delivered numerous projects, workshops, publications and talks in the UK and across the world, all of which look toward realising just and equitable visions of change in our built environment.
Much of RESOLVE’s work aims to provide platforms for the production of new knowledge and ideas. An integral part of this way of working means designing with and for young people and under-represented groups in society. Here, ‘design’ encompasses both physical and systemic intervention, exploring ways of using a project’s site as a resource and working with different communities as stakeholders in the short and long-term management of projects. In this way, design carries more than aesthetic value; it is also a mechanism for political and socio-economic change.
Playfool is an art-design duo by Daniel Coppen (b. London) and Saki Maruyama (b. Fukushima). Through experimental games and interactive installations, they use play to intervene in and reimagine the relationship between human agency and technology, inviting critical dialogue with our techno-social reality.
Playfool is a fellow at institutions including Onassis ONX (Athens) and CCBT (Tokyo). Their work has been awarded in the S+T+ARTS Prize (2024) and Dezeen Award (2021), and exhibited internationally at the Science Gallery (Monterrey, 2025), Ars Electronica (Linz, 2024), and the V&A Museum (London, 2023).
TRANS VOICES blend meditative soundscapes, emerging technology, choral tradition, and bold vocal experimentation to reclaim spaces where trans perspectives are rarely heard. Founded by Coda Nicolaeff and Ilā Kamalagharan, their portfolio of work includes a critically-acclaimed spatial sound installation at the Barbican, a Guardian documentary, an award-winning digital campaign with Absolut, and collaborations with Kesha, Olly Alexander, and Imogen Heap, as well as talks and performances at Harvard and Oxford Universities.
