In 1982, Sir Norman Rosenthal curated Zeitgeist at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau, an exhibition that sought to capture the spirit of a particular historical moment through the work of a generation of artists. Nearly 40 years later, Rosenthal returns to that idea with London Zeitgeist, a group exhibition presented by CIRCA across public screens in London, Seoul and Tokyo.

The timing is significant. London in 2021 finds itself suspended between endings and beginnings. The United Kingdom has formally left the European Union. The pandemic has transformed public life. Questions surrounding race, identity, migration, sexuality and belonging occupy the centre of cultural debate. Yet despite predictions of decline, London remains one of the world’s great creative cities, continuing to attract artists, writers, musicians and thinkers from across the globe. The city remains restless, contradictory and alive.

London Zeitgeist brings together four artists and one artist duo whose practices have emerged from this environment: Alvaro Barrington, Matt Copson, Larry Achiampong, and Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings. Working across painting, film, installation, performance and digital media, they offer no unified manifesto. Instead, their works reveal a city shaped by multiple histories, identities and perspectives. Taken together, they suggest a portrait of contemporary London at a moment of profound transformation.

The exhibition takes place within a lineage that has long defined the city itself. Since the end of the Second World War, successive generations of artists have gathered in London, forming communities that reflected the concerns of their own era. From Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud around Soho and the Colony Room, to the emergence of Pop Art in the 1960s, from the conceptual and sculptural experiments of the 1970s to the Young British Artists of the 1990s, London’s cultural history has continually been renewed through the arrival of new voices and new perspectives. Every generation inherits the city and remakes it.

For Rosenthal, this process is the essence of the word Zeitgeist. The spirit of an age is never singular. It emerges through the overlapping dreams, anxieties, obsessions and aspirations of the people living through it.

Alvaro Barrington opens the exhibition with Trust Your Global Stranger, a meditation on community, migration and interconnectedness. Drawing upon his own experiences moving between the Caribbean, New York and London, Barrington’s work proposes a vision of identity that resists borders and embraces exchange. Presented on the monumental scale of the public screen, drifting clouds become both a poetic image and a political proposition: an invitation to trust those we do not yet know.

Matt Copson’s Gargoyle introduces a darker presence. Emerging from a world of medieval folklore, animation and contemporary mythology, the work speaks in the language of warning, prophecy and satire. Copson’s grotesque figure occupies a space somewhere between the ancient and the digital, reflecting the fears and uncertainties that accompany moments of social change.

In Reliquary 2: A Letter of 4 Chapters, Larry Achiampong turns towards questions of memory, migration and inheritance. Drawing upon his Ghanaian heritage and his experience of contemporary Britain, Achiampong constructs narratives that move fluidly between personal history and collective experience. His work reflects a London shaped not by singular identities but by countless overlapping journeys and stories.

The exhibition concludes with Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings’ Everything is folly in this world that does not give us pleasure, a title borrowed from Verdi’s La Traviata. Their film reflects upon queer histories, communities and spaces that have often existed at the margins of official narratives. Looking towards both the past and the future, the work becomes an act of remembrance for forms of social life that remain vulnerable to disappearance, while affirming pleasure, intimacy and solidarity as essential forms of cultural resistance.

Presented across some of the world’s largest public screens, London Zeitgeist extends beyond the gallery and into the rhythms of everyday life. The exhibition asks what kind of city London is becoming and what kinds of artists it continues to produce. Its answer is neither singular nor definitive. Instead, it proposes that London’s greatest strength remains its capacity for reinvention.

At a moment when the city is repeatedly being asked to define itself, these artists offer a different perspective. Rather than looking for certainty, they embrace complexity. Rather than nostalgia, they propose new possibilities. Together, their works reveal a city still in motion, still arguing with itself, still imagining what comes next.

That, perhaps, is the true spirit of the times.