MAIN PHOTO CREDIT: Artist Lucy Muss – Sunny Side Up
Art, music and culture spill across Hackney – from ceramics markets and sound systems to outdoor projections, unexpected installations, and exhibitions that appear where you least expect them.
Founded in 2025 by Hackney residents Lisa Baker and Anna McHugh, the Hackney Art Week festival unfolds across Dalston, Clapton, London Fields, De Beauvoir, Stoke Newington, Haggerston and Hackney Wick – transforming the borough into a loose network of cultural moments rather than a fixed programme.
This isn’t art week in the traditional sense. It’s art as atmosphere. A mural on your commute. A pop-up in a café you didn’t expect to see transformed. A sound system spilling into a courtyard. A projection flickering across concrete as you cut through a housing estate at night.
Across ten days, Hackney’s creative life moves out of studios and into everyday spaces – record shops, pubs, bakeries, hairdressers, and street corners – where exhibitions sit alongside food, music and performance, and the boundaries between them blur.
Long recognised as one of London’s most concentrated creative communities, the London Borough of Hackney continues to shape the city’s cultural identity. But with space increasingly limited, independent platforms like this have become vital – not just for showing work, but for sustaining it.
Hackney Art Week responds directly to that shift, creating opportunities for artists to present work within the neighbourhoods that support them, while meeting audiences where they already are.
Much of the work is available to purchase throughout the festival, from prints and editions to site-specific pieces made for the week. A series of limited-edition Hackney Art Week prints will also be released in support of local charity Hackney Giving.
Alongside exhibitions, the programme includes spoken word, ceramics workshops, an art treasure hunt, sound system takeovers and live performance – but its real energy lies in what happens between them: the chance encounters, the shifting streets, and the feeling that the borough itself is part of the work.
In a city that often feels like it’s constantly accelerating, Hackney Art Week slows things down just enough to notice what’s already there – and then subtly rearranges it. A street becomes a gallery. A shop becomes a studio. A night out becomes something you didn’t quite plan, but wouldn’t have wanted to miss.
When? 4-14th June 2026
Opening Night party 3 June – The Rose Lipman Building
Locations: Dalston, De Beauvoir, Clapton, London Fields, Hackney Wick, Haggerston, Stoke Newington