Bringing Back The Salon: UK Organisation Aims To Revive Brighton's Contemporary Art Scene The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

Brighton's Royal Pavilion, long associated with Regency spectacle and royal fantasy, is preparing for a different kind of pageantry. On 30 May, the Adelaide Salon will stage a ticketed contemporary art gala across the building's 10,000 sq. ft ground floor, bringing together performance, installations, film, fashion, music, and a tapestry by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke.

The event is the latest move by the Adelaide Salon, a self-funded organization founded in 2024 by Pascal Dowers and Paulina Anzorge in response to a series of losses in Brighton's cultural life. In 2023, Brighton University's Centre for Contemporary Art closed, and Fabrica gallery ended its exhibition program after Arts Council funding was withdrawn. The new initiative was created, in part, to help rebuild that damaged ecosystem.

Dowers, a former gallerist, carbon manufacturer, and designer, and Anzorge, an artist and curator, have been developing the project through a sequence of events that blur disciplinary lines. During the 2024 Artists Open Houses festival, they began hosting exhibitions and gatherings at their home in Adelaide Crescent, near Maureen Paley's Morena di Luna gallery. Their model draws on the Parisian salon tradition, with artists, scientists, philosophers, designers, and musicians brought into the same room to test where conversation becomes collaboration.

That approach is already visible at Brighton Dome, where the Adelaide Salon has taken over the Founders Room with Act O, on view until 25 May as part of Brighton Festival. The space, usually associated with music and theater, will later be converted into a permanent contemporary art gallery. The opening on 3 May included performances by Brighton-based artists and a live sound work by M3ON. Among the pieces was Again and Again (2026) by Andy Ash in collaboration with Nina Garstang, a tethered performance that recalled the physical intensity of Marina Abromović and Ulay while asking how far collaboration can stretch before it begins to break.

The Royal Pavilion gala is meant to push that experiment further. Dowers says it is the first event of its kind in the former palace in 175 years, when the town was last invited inside after the king and queen had moved out. The building, constructed in the early 1800s as a seaside pleasure palace for King George IV, is owned by the local council and managed by the Royal Pavilion and Museums Trust, even though much of its contents are on loan from the Royal Collection.

The Adelaide Salon plans to make the Pavilion event annual and eventually open a permanent large-scale contemporary art space in Brighton. In a city still adjusting to the loss of major venues, the project is positioning itself not as a one-off intervention, but as an infrastructure in the making.

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