Lost in Whiteness - The 2026 Year 2 Race, Power and Privilege Exhibition - Art as Activism
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You might choose to listen to the audio while scrolling through the post, so that you can experience the words alongside the images, which are central to the story.
Every year, Homa’s Year 2 trainees are invited to create an exhibition that brings together the work from their exploration of race, power and privilege through art and mark-making. In doing this, they explore racism and all that it means, using creativity and art as a form of activism.
This is the fourth year we have held the exhibition. Each one has been completely unique. Each one has been challneging in its own way for the trainees who created it and has asked something different of those of us invited to witness it.
This year’s exhibition was called Lost in Whiteness.
The exhibition was curated by Year 2 trainee, Seyi Jacobs, who shaped its vision with courage, honesty and creativity.
The whole Year 2 group then worked together to bring that vision to life, transforming the Homa house for just a few hours, one evening in July.
All the rooms, walls and corridors of the Homa house became spaces in which to stop, look, listen and reflect. Each piece offered a different encounter with racism, whiteness, power and privilege.
I don’t want to explain the work too much in this post. My intention, as far as possible, to let it speak for itself.
One room displayed a selection of the mark-making created by trainees and tutors during the Race, Power & Privilege term. Each week, as we explored a different aspect of racism together, everyone was invited to respond through mark making, using words, colour, form, in whatever way felt right to them.
These pieces are immediate and personal responses rather than art specifically made for exhibition. Some express anger, grief or confusion. Others hold questions, commitments or moments of recognition. There are words repeated insistently, dense layers of colour, tentative pencil marks and bold declarations. Each piece reveals something of what had been stirred up in that particular person at that particular moment.
Talking about race and racism tends to stir feelings and experiences that can be difficult to express in words. Mark-making can offer us a way in. There is no expectation to create something polished or beautiful or even to know exactly what we want to say.
The simple act of choosing a colour, repeating a word or making a mark can give shape to something felt but not necessarily fully understood. This is part of the power of art therapy: what we feel or sense inside us can be placed outside us, where it can be seen, reflected on and then shared.
Displayed side by side, these individual responses became a collective record of the term’s work. They show how differently the same conversations can be experienced and how much can be communicated without needing to explain everything in words. I hope they invited visitors to pause, reflect and begin conversations of their own.
As well as curating the exhibition, Seyi created two pieces especially for it. White Parasite uses the image of a parasite to explore how white supremacy takes hold, extracting wealth, labour and resources while hiding and normalising unequal systems. In Can You Stand in the Fire With Me? a flower blooms within flames. This piece holds strength and vulnerability together, asking what it means not simply to witness another person’s pain, but to stand alongside them in it.
Another room explored The White Gaze. Countless eyes covered the walls, hung from the ceiling and looked out from the screen. They were all photographed by the trainees and belonged to the trainees themselves, their family and friends and Homa tutors. Asking people to allow them to use their eyes for this piece did not just create the work but also started conversations about the white gaze, making the installation deeply personal as well as collective. Sitting among them, watched by eyes from every direction, was an intense, unsettling and powerful experience. For many people from the Global Majority, the white gaze can mean being constantly watched, scrutinised, judged and understood through white assumptions. This piece invited those of us who do not live with that gaze to experience, briefly and imperfectly, something of its weight.
Yet another room explored white privilege through Peggy McIntosh’s idea of the invisible knapsack, the unearned advantages that many white people carry without noticing, often with almost no awareness of the ease that these privileges bring to our every day lives. Visitors were invited to consider and respond to McIntosh’s statements and to add examples of their own privileges, making the invisible visible.
A collaborative weaving explored intersectionality: the many threads of identity, experience, power and oppression that meet and shape our lives. Visitors added their own threads, gradually changing the work and becoming part of it.
The Media Room brought together news footage, interviews and social-media clips showing how racism can be repeated and reinforced through stereotypes, biased reporting, unequal representation, abuse and violence. Visitors were invited to consider how the media shapes our understanding of people and events, and what repeated exposure to racist imagery can do, causing distress for those directly affected while risking desensitisation in others. The room asked us to pay closer attention to what we consume, whose voices are heard and how we might engage with the media more critically.
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We are very grateful to Dr Aileen Alleyne who spoke at the event and read a poem that she crafted especially for the exhibition.
Dr Aileen is a psychodynamic psychotherapist, writer, clinical supervisor and organisational consultant whose important work explores race, Black identity, intergenerational trauma and what she has named “racial hauntings.” She is the author of The Burden of Heritage: Hauntings of Generational Trauma on Black Lives and more recently, her second book, Navigating Racial Landscapes: Wholeness and Wounds. She is also Homa’s supervisor and consultant and we are enormously fortunate to have her alongside us.
Her poem brought another voice and another art form into the exhibition and a moment of stillness in which we could all gather and listen together.
Marks That Remain
Not every mark
is made by charcoal,
paint,
or graphite.
Some are made
by a question
finally asked.
Some by a silence
finally broken.
Some by choosing
not to turn away
when it would be easier.
This year,
you students have entered conversations
MANY avoid.
You have met difference.
You have met yourselves.
Perhaps you discovered
that truth rarely arrives
all wrapped in comfort and nice, neat packages.
It asks only
that you stay with discomfort – your own unease.
Stay
when certainty trembles.
Stay
when old assumptions and scripts are loosened.
Stay
when shame exposes you –
visible, with embarrassed flushes,
uncomfortable with sweaty bums
and you want to retreat.
Stay
Because the workwas never simply
JUST to understand THE OTHER.
It has always been
to encounter
the self
that THE OTHER awakens.
Which allows feedback,
to be offered with care,
that becomes a relationship.
Listening in colour,
practised with courage,
becomes repair.
Today,
your marks surround us.
Each line,
each texture,
each hesitation
bears witness
to lives honestly encountered in this HOMA training journey.
These are not simply artworks.
They are conversations (internal and external)
made visible.
Psychoanalysis has given us
a beautiful word for the creative and liberatory pursuit of mark-making: It is…
Sublimation.
The human capacity
to transform pain,
conflict,
fear, trauma
longing
into thought,
image,
poetry,
and art.
Not denying suffering –
but shaping it
into something
that enlarges life – your life – all life.
So may you continue
to be curious
rather than avoid.
To stay and own personal responsibility
rather than retreat.
To speak your truth
without abandoning care.
And long after
these marks
leave these walls,
may you continue
to make the kinds of marks
that help another human being – your client
feel seen, heard, understood, AND
held, like a delicate China cup
to feel less alone.
Because perhaps,
that is THE most enduring mark
any psychotherapist,
or any human being,
can ever leave…their mark.
Dr Aileen Alleyne – Crafted July 10th 2026
For HOMA’s Trainee Art Exhibition: Race, Power, and Privilege
***
As well as the mark making and the immersive pieces, the trainees also provided a wonderful spread of food, much of it homemade. It was generous, abundant and delicious, yet another expression of the thought and care they brought to the whole exhibition.
What the photographs and videos cannot fully show is the enormous amount of work that went into creating the exhibition.
There were hours of thinking, planning, making and remaking. There was organising, collaborating, cooking and installing. There were difficult conversations and decisions. There was the care with which everything was brought together and then, only a few hours later, taken apart again.
I wish we could have kept the exhibition open for days rather than hours.
Throughout the evening there was a real, tangible buzz in the house. People moved slowly through the rooms. We paused in front of the work. We talked, ate and spent time together. We reflected. We responded to what we saw and felt. We connected - to each other and to the work and to the impact of racim and systems of opression in the world.
This is exactly what the exhibition is for.
The Homa tutor team enjoyed the exhibition very much, although enjoyed is perhaps not quite the right word. We felt moved and we are very grateful to the trainees for stepping into the breach and making it happen, for creating a space in which conversations about racism can take place. And we are very grateful to Trupti Magecha, the Homa director and tutor who created the Race, Power and Privilege module and brings her expertise as an Art Psychotherapist to the work, making it a uniquely powerful experience.
And alongside the thought provoking, challenging, uncomfortable and incisive nature of the work on display, there was enjoyment too. The joy of meeting the trainees' friends and families, of being together as a community, of eating good food and having enlivening conversations, of experiencing the power of collective creativity.
A huge appreciation to Seyi for curating the exhibition so honestly and beautifully and to every member of Year 2 for the care, commitment and hard work with which they endeavoured to realise her vision.
We are sure that the conversations did not end when the last visitor left and the exhibition came down.
We trust that they continue to ripple outwards.
This is what makes this work so powerful.
This is activism.
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