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Auto Italia is an artist-run organisation and project space that commissions new work, bringing together international networks of artists committed to the development of emerging practices and discussions in contemporary art.

20/10/2026

Last week to see ‘Sensual / Mutual’ by Del LaGrace Volcano!

We’re open from Thursday to Sunday, 12– 5pm. The exhibition continues until 25 October.

Surfacing unseen bodies of work from the 1970s and 80s, the exhibition focuses on Volcano’s time in San Francisco and Santa Fe, tracing q***r, feminist, leather d**e, gender-variant, and land-based communities in the process of making themselves visible.

Often described as a legendary d**e photographer, Volcano is not only a pioneering voice of their generation, but one of the most urgent artists working today. Across more than five decades, their work has traced the political, social, and cultural shifts that have shaped LGBTQ+ histories, from the aftermath of Stonewall and the emergence of le***an feminism, through Section 28 and the AIDS crisis, to the present-day rise in anti-trans and far-right ideology.

Developed during periods of intense political and social struggle in the United States, the works presented trace the emergence of insurgent q***r spaces, collective imaginaries, and communities in revolt. From bars to communal housing to land-based feminist collectives, the exhibition maps a geography of q***r world-making, surfacing how such spaces functioned not only as sites of refuge, but as laboratories for new social forms, where kinship, desire, labour, and political commitment were continually redefined.

‘Sensual / Mutual’ is commissioned by Auto Italia, with support from Arts Council England. Its sister exhibition, ‘Love Bites Back’, was commissioned and presented by Edinburgh Art Festival between 14–30 August.

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photography: Mark Blower.

Del LaGrace Volcano

16/10/2026

British Vogue names Del LaGrace Volcano’s solo exhibition ‘Sensual / Mutual’ at Auto Italia one of the best British contemporary art shows to see before summer ends.

“At Auto Italia, a solo show dedicated to Del LaGrace Volcano, an essential chronicler of q***r counterculture in America over the past half century, as it has been lived and experienced on the ground. Sensual / Mutual, the artist’s first institutional solo show in Britain, features previously unseen photographs shot between q***r community hubs in San Francisco and Santa Fe during the ’70s and ’80s to light, highlighting vital histories of resistance and “the fragile, contingent nature of q***r visibility” at a moment that couldn’t feel more urgent.”

‘Sensual / Mutual’ is open Thursday to Sunday, 12 – 5pm and runs until 25 October.⁠

Del LaGrace Volcano
British Vogue

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, ‘Dyke Cuties, San Francisco Pride,’ 1981

13/10/2026

Book Now: Free immigration, asylum and migrant rights training with Praxis.

As part of Auto Italia’s Participation Artist-in-Residence programme with Rose Nordin and Brighter Futures, a group of young migrants supported by Praxis and Kazzum Arts, we’re offering three free training sessions led by Praxis.

Praxis is a human rights charity that supports migrants and refugees through advice, practical support and campaigning for their right to live with safety, dignity and respect.

The sessions will explore rights and entitlements within the immigration and asylum system, how to challenge negative narratives around migration, and the role of trauma-informed practice when working with people navigating these systems.

Training dates:

Tuesday 3 November, 2–5pm
Understanding rights and entitlements in the immigration and asylum system

Thursday 5 November, 2–5pm
Living in the Hostile Environment: countering negative narratives

Monday 9 November, 10am–1pm
Understanding trauma-informed practice in the immigration and asylum system

These sessions are designed for anyone interested in developing their understanding of migration and asylum, and learning how to better support people navigating the immigration and asylum system.

All sessions will take place at Auto Italia and are free, but spaces are limited. Find out more and book your place via the link in our bio.

The Participation Artist-in-Residence programme is generously supported by The National Lottery Community Fund and Arts Council England.

10/10/2026

Extended Opening Hours: Next week during Frieze London, our current exhibition ‘Sensual / Mutual’ by Del LaGrace Volcano will be open from Tuesday to Sunday, 13 – 18 October, 12 – 5pm.

‘Sensual / Mutual’ is the first major institutional solo exhibition in the UK by Del LaGrace Volcano. Surfacing unseen bodies of work from the 1970s and 80s, the exhibition focuses on Volcano’s time in San Francisco and Santa Fe, tracing q***r, feminist, leather d**e, gender-variant, and land-based communities in the process of making themselves visible.

Del LaGrace Volcano

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photography: Mark Blower.

09/10/2026

ANNOUNCEMENT: Rose Nordin and Brighter Futures present a new exhibition at Auto Italia, opening 3 November, 6–8pm.

This exhibition is the culmination of a collaboration between Auto Italia participation artist-in-residence Rose Nordin and collaborators from Brighter Futures, a group of young migrants supported by Praxis and Kazzum Arts.

Across a series of workshops, the collaborators have explored scents connected to places that are important to them, developing their own fragrances alongside drawings, words and reflections. The project explores how scent can hold memories and carry experiences across languages, cultures and distance, offering a way to challenge increasingly negative narratives around migration.

Building on this work, Rose has developed a ‘scent alphabet’, giving each scent category its own visual symbol. These symbols, alongside the collaborators’ work, run throughout the exhibition and a new pocket-sized scented publication, ‘A Cloud in the Fold of the Elbow’, which takes its title from the way scent can gather and linger in the fold of the elbow, while the cloud evokes the way scent spreads and travels through air.

The exhibition brings these different parts of the project together in the gallery, with the collaborators’ fragrances present throughout the work and infused into the publication and other visual materials. Their drawings, scents and reflections carry through the exhibition, while also taking new forms through Rose’s graphic and installation work.

The publication also connects the project with Rose’s wider research, featuring new texts and interviews about scent by Ezra-Lloyd Jackson, Amrita Dhallu and Sarah Shin, edited by Lillian Wilkie.

A public programme of events and practical training sessions will accompany the exhibition, including conversations around migration and sessions on rights and entitlements, the immigration and asylum system, and trauma-informed practice.

The programme is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, in partnership with Brighter Futures, with generous support from The National Lottery Community Fund and Arts Council England.

Rose Nordin
John McCance
Praxis, for migrants and refugees
Kazzum Arts 🧡

06/10/2026

Join us on Thursday 22nd October, 6:30–8:30pm for Practising Civic Learning, a discussion and workshop facilitated by curators Agnese Politi and Giulia Menegale, with researcher Andy Belfield (public works).

Bringing together questions of access to space, funding, and long-term resources across the arts sector, this session considers how cultural workers might develop alternative infrastructures that are shared, collectively governed, and responsive to their specific contexts. Combining conversation and workshop, the session draws on the organising practices and experience of R-Urban Poplar, an eco-civic hub on the Teviot Estate in Tower Hamlets.

The first part invites participants to exchange tactics for confronting the increasingly precarious conditions of artistic and cultural practice in the UK and internationally.

Drawing on R-Urban’s experience, the second focuses on collectively developing methodologies and tools for sharing resources, fostering solidarity-based exchange, and building the alliances and organisational structures needed to sustain cultural work over time.

The event is free to attend and will be held at Auto Italia. To register, follow the link in our bio.

The event is part of Giulia Menegale’s research project “Beyond Institutional Critique: Southern Epistemologies and the Reconfiguration of Institutional Debates’ granted by DG Creatività Contemporanea MiC of the Italian Ministry of Culture - Ministero della Cultura under the program (2026)

menegale

ualresearchsociety
Arts Students' Union

Image: Climate Companions Digest: A Collective Feast of ‘All Things Layered’ at R-Urban Poplar, 2022.

01/10/2026

Our current exhibition ‘Sensual / Mutual’ by Del LaGrace Volcano is open Thursday to Sunday, 12 – 5pm and runs until 25 October.⁠

‘Sensual / Mutual’, the first major institutional solo exhibition in the UK by Del LaGrace Volcano. Surfacing unseen bodies of work from the 1970s and 80s, the exhibition focuses on Volcano’s time in San Francisco and Santa Fe, tracing q***r, feminist, leather d**e, gender-variant, and land-based communities in the process of making themselves visible.

Del LaGrace Volcano

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photography: Mark Blower.

30/09/2026

Join us on 17 October at 2pm for curator Orlan Ohtonen and artist Del LaGrace Volcano in conversation. Ohtonen and Volcano will discuss Volcano’s current exhibition, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, which surfaces unseen photographs from the artist’s time in 1970s and 80s San Francisco and Santa Fe among leather d**es, gender-variant people and land-based communities. The talk will consider Volcano’s five-decade practice of embedded, collaborative image-making, its role in shaping q***r, trans and feminist visual culture, and what these histories of self-fashioning and collective life might offer to the present.

This event is generously supported by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.

Del LaGrace Volcano
Orlan Ohtonen
Finnish Institute UK & Ireland

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, courtesy of the artist.

Join us on 17 October at 2pm for curator Orlan Ohtonen and artist Del LaGrace Volcano in conversation. Ohtonen and Volcano will discuss Volcano’s current exhibition, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, which surfaces unseen photographs from the artist’s time in 1970s and 80s San Francisco and Santa Fe among leather d**es, gender-variant people and land-based communities. The talk will consider Volcano’s five-decade practice of embedded, collaborative image-making, its role in shaping q***r, trans and feminist visual culture, and what these histories of self-fashioning and collective life might offer to the present.

This event is generously supported by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.

Del LaGrace Volcano
Orlan Ohtonen
Finnish Institute UK & Ireland

Image: Orlan Ohtonen, Venla Helenius, 2025.

15/09/2026

Juliet Jacques reviews Del LaGrace Volcano’s solo exhibition ‘Sensual / Mutual’ at Auto Italia and sister exhibition ‘Love Bites Back’ at Edinburgh Arts Festival for Frieze.

“They appear very much of their time, documenting US d**e bars, a Le***an and Gay Freedom Day Parade, a radical feminist commune and an early 1990s British scene infused with punk, goth and biker subcultures. Yet in these two shows they feel contemporary, speaking to a strong need for politicized self-organization in the face of renewed oppression. These are images that were made primarily for the people in them: Volcano staged erotic photographs of their le***an communities, many of whom rejected heteronormative sexual dynamics, gender expressions and family systems.”

Del LaGrace Volcano
Frieze

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano, ‘Sensual / Mutual’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photography: Mark Blower.

10/09/2026

Join us on Thursday 8th October, 6 – 8pm, for ‘Edelweiss Pirates’, a collaborative workshop and installation series with artists Brutus Labiche and Ajahee Sekkm-Miles.

Responding to the rise of far-right rhetoric and the increasing use of national symbols to promote exclusionary ideas of identity and belonging, this session invites participants to reclaim and reinterpret national symbols through collage. Using UK tabloids, personal archives and the Auto Italia archive, participants will rework images and texts to create new interpretations of national symbols and narrative that question how national identity is represented.

The project takes its name from the ‘Edelweiss Pirates’, informal youth groups who resisted the rigidity of N**i ideology. Their refusal to conform, and their creation of their own rituals and forms of belonging, provides a starting point for the workshop, which considers how identity can be challenged and reimagined.

‘Edelweiss Pirates’ is an ongoing series in which each workshop becomes a temporary installation and contributes to a growing transnational archive. These workshops explore how identity is lived, constructed and redefined across communities and borders.

Originally developed in Switzerland, this will be the first Edelweiss Pirates workshop in the UK.

This event is free to attend and will take place at Auto Italia. To register, follow the link in our bio.

Ajahee Sekkm-Miles

Address

44 Bonner Road
London
E29JS

Opening Hours

Thursday	12pm - 5pm
Friday	12pm - 5pm
Saturday	12pm - 5pm
Sunday	12pm - 5pm

Telephone

+442089834115

Website

http://www.autoitaliasoutheast.org/

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