Beverley Carruthers, Bettina Furnée, Olga Jürgenson and Idit Elia Nathan
Leaving Were The Ones Who Could Not Stay
- Thu 4 Sep 2025 9:00 – Sat 18 Oct 2025 17:00
Broadway Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Leaving Were The Ones Who Could Not Stay, a new exhibition featuring the work of Beverley Carruthers, Bettina Furnée, Olga Jürgenson and Idit Elia Nathan, opening on Thursday 4 September at Broadway Gallery, Letchworth.
Running through 18 October 2025, the exhibition features four Cambridge-based artists who explore the socio-political forces shaping familial bonds, migration, and intergenerational memory. Through sound, video, collage, and interactive installations, they draw on personal histories, interviews, found material and family archives to reimagine borders, displacement, and the meaning of home.
This collectively created project encourages sharing of prescient stories of migration and displacement to question societal change and bonds.
All four artists present large-scale new works in this exhibition: Hailstones, Bars and Meshes is a sound installation with photographic prints by Beverley Carruthers, exploring contemporary oral histories of labour, migration, and community storytelling. Out Of Our Earth is a three-channel film and sound installation by Bettina Furnée that explores ‘leaving’- a friend, a home, a country, our planet- by blending tales of migration and farewell with recorded interviews and elements of science fiction. Permission to Return Granted by Olga Jürgenson explores the impact of forced collectivisation, Stalin’s terror and World War II on the migrant Estonian community, including her family, in the Ulyanovsk area of Soviet Russia during the period between 1929 and 1953. Trigger Warning by Idit Elia Nathan is a sculptural installation of handkerchiefs passed down through the maternal line, delicately embroidered with press images from the war in Gaza and artistic responses to historic horrors of war.
The project is supported throughout by Counterpoints’ biennial festival Platforma’25, focused on migration in the East. Additional events with Uncovering Letchworth, METAL Peterborough and Revoluton Arts, Luton, will use the exhibition themes to stimulate conversation and connect (migrant) artists in the region.
Gallery
Gallery
Public Programme & Events
An Opening Reception will take place at the Broadway Gallery on Thursday 4 September 2025, 18.30-21.00.
A workshop exploring memory, identity, and home through personal photographs and objects from the Garden City Collection, led by the artists, will take place at Broadway Gallery on Saturday 4 October 2025, from 11:00 to 12:30. More information can be found here.
An artist-led 'walk and talk' tour of the exhibition will take place on Saturday 11 October 2025, 12.00-13.30 offering a chance to hear directly from the artists about their work and ideas.
Artist Biographies
Beverley Carruthers is a multimedia artist exploring female experience, and how this is navigated through ritual and performance in photography, generative text, sound art, performance and film. She is a Royal College of Art alumnus and was senior lecturer in photography at London College of Communication where she co-created the Writing Photographs research project, investigating how image and text come together, particularly in an installation context. She recently ran The Expanded Librarian as collaboration between The Royal College of Art, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, and University of The Arts, London. She organised the Reframing Menopause research project where she has made collaborative film and texts works and co-curated the first multidisciplinary menopause conference at University of Cambridge in 2019. She has run two conferences at Tate Modern, and an extensive exhibition, public lecture, and workshop program. She is an experienced workshop leader having taught for over 30 years at University of the Arts, with public workshops at The Photographers’ Gallery, Tate Modern and LCC Studios.
http://www.beverleycarruthers.com
Bettina Furnée was born in The Netherlands and is studio artist at Wysing Arts Centre. Her text-based practice includes installation, live events and moving image. She works collaboratively with writers, musicians and participants to create projects that challenge dominant narratives and amplify voices from the community. Her projects are often situated in public places where power resides, such as a church, library, mountain or bunker, exploring the instability of language through wordplay, text and sound. For instance, collaborative project Even You Song was a choral evensong based on interviews with twelve couples about a potential space mission, and this premiered at Peterborough Cathedral, before touring in 2019. Powerhouse was a temporary installation, set of posters, archival work and film, which resulted from a durational word association game staged at Cambridge University Library, as part of a residency at Kettle’s Yard. She has been awarded public commissions, group and solo shows, residencies and support for self-initiated projects. In 2020 she was selected for alternative learning programme Syllabus VI, and she is currently artist in residence for Natur Am Byth, Wales’ green recovery programme.
Olga Jürgenson was born in Siberia and raised in Estonia; she is currently based in Cambridge and works and exhibits internationally. Olga is drawn to the subject of human nature’s complexity - whether it’s from the perspective of a female artist collaborating with the world’s first AI sex doll Samantha, TV detective stories questioning the role of god, or a painter of portraits of robots disguised as celebrities.
She has participated in many group exhibitions globally, including 56th Venice Biennial, MANIFESTA 10, and Liverpool, Moscow and Ural biennials. She has been awarded grants and awards from several European foundations, and in 2011 she was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize (Moscow, Russia). Recent solo exhibitions were at the Tallinn Art Hall Gallery, Estonia (2021-2022), Espronceda Centre for Arts and Culture, Barcelona, Spain (2018), New Hall Art Collection, University of Cambridge, UK (2014), amongst others. Olga's works are held in state and private collections across the world, including British Film Institute, London (UK), The University of Cambridge (UK), Oulu Art Museum (Finland), National Centre for Contemporary Art (Russia). Olga curated the National Pavilion of Mauritius at the 56th and 57th Venice Biennale.
Idit Elia Nathan grew up in Jerusalem. She is a conceptual artist whose work includes interactive installations, live events, games, audio-visual works, walks and artists’ books where play operates as a productively provocative space to challenge accepted understandings. Using optics, scale and perspective, participants are invited to respond to contemporary dilemmas both as actors with free will and actors in an historical and cultural context. Her artworks have been been exhibited internationally and are held in private and public collections including Kettle’s Yard, Standpoint, IMT, Parasol Unit, Royal Institute of British Architects, Triangle Space, Pushkin House, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Pembroke and Homerton colleges (Cambridge), Crypt Gallery and Materia Gallery (Rome), Toxic Dreams (Vienna), Display Cult (Canada and US) and Zarya Centre for Contemporary Arts (Vladivostok). Until recently Idit was associate lecturer at Central St. Martin’s College (University of the Arts London), where she completed an arts practice PhD titled Art of Play in Zones of Conflict – the Case of Israel Palestine in 2018.