Emii Alrai, Mac Collins, Richard Dean Hughes, Idris Khan, Raheel Khan, Gillian Wearing

17 May - 20 September 2025
Bold Tendencies, London

Déjà vu, the uncanny yet familiar sensation, haunts the vanishing point of consciousness. In it we surrender to an other-worldly incursion of the spectral, eerie and surreal—a rush of recognition engulfed by dark swells of memory. Objects appear to us as rare, places become strange, meetings sudden; the happenstance, all but fate. Déjà vu ripples from fractures in the waking mind to the great chasms of our collective unconscious, twisting through contrasting and conflicting worlds of psychology, neuroscience and folk superstition. A world of estrangement in which, as Henri Bergson notes, 'We feel that we choose and will, but that we are choosing what is imposed on us and willing the inevitable.'

Spontaneous and arresting, déjà vu elicits a deeper, more compulsive sense of the real and our place within it—one in which memory, illusion and enigma are irrevocably entwined. Time becomes looped. Memories soften. Doubles and doppelgängers abound. A moment of mystery and intimation is felt with the intensity of divine intervention: a reflection of monotonous digital ennui, of fantastical, fractious dreamscapes or the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach. Déjà vu lurks in the shadows of anonymous stone circles and stares at us from the bewildered eyes of an amnesiac; pulses through the cosmic veins of deep time and cries for the failed optimism of abandoned modernist ruins, our eternal return through tragedy and farce.

In its grasp reality is untethered—if only for an instant—from what Max Ernst would call our ‘virtue of censorship’: the shackles of linear time, the guard of human agency and the guarantees of a shared, nostalgic past. Engulfing us in a foreign terrain of rhythms, pulsions and patternings beyond our knowing, déjà vu offers us not only a glimpse of but access to spaces beyond the limits of consciousness and anodyne everyday experience. Providing opportunities to explore the contested, compelling blank space of what lies in-between, déjà vu is the echo of a song that lingers long after the last note has faded.

The needle has skipped the groove of the present. Speaking to a world of long-forgotten dreams, untold stories and future premonitions, Bold Tendencies will gather its 2025 programme under this broad and enigmatic theme. It will explore the dark, surreal and compulsive; the illusory, absurd and superstitious; the fantastical, otherworldly and more-than-human, asking how the uncanny principles of déjà vu resonate with us today. And in times of uncertainty and scepticism, how an experience of its world might offer moments important to us in ways not yet clear or binding, but filled with the ungovernable yet promissory optimism of what will have been.