Andreas Gursky, Emma Hart, Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban, Tarek Lakhrissi, Louis Morlæ

15 May - 12 September 2026
Bold Tendencies, London

The longing to transcend oneself – if only for a brief moment – is and has always been a constitutional ache of the human heart. To rush headlong into sensations, feelings and fancies that eclipse the carceral routine of selfhood and self-interest, to glimpse into the embers of a warm and enveloping sublime. Euphoria, an oozy yearn, a bliss-ache, a trembly effervescence that feels like champagne for blood. From open-hearted tête-à-têtes to arenas of collective catharsis, nostalgic memories of subtle bliss to full-blown mystical rapture – it isn’t the presence of meaning that defines euphoria but its excess.

We live in a world that pathologises intensity. Collective joy is policed, revolutionary desire flattened, individual passions mined for data and sold back to us in a consumer culture of throwaway experiences. A world filled with frictionless, decelerating demi-pleasures: readable books, lo-fi house mixes, microdosing, ASMR, pre-made meal kits and VR sex lives. Each of life’s pleasures in a hassle-free, diminishing dose – the hollow, vacant feeling of culture made by algorithm. The ecstasy of cultural adrenaline that once defined pre-millennial optimism – hyper-speed technology, rave, cyberspace and cultural pluralism – simmered to an endless fog of inertia, repetition and melancholy.

We are eager for escape. Too often are the high-crests of human emotion stirred not by the exhilarating qualities of art, dancing and carnival but by the exploitative fervour of political rallies, state-sponsored spectacles, viral TikTok videos and hysterical product launches. Cruel pleasures that conspire to use the intoxicating frenzies of fever-pitch against us, obscuring an ever-diminishing landscape of anti-protest legislation, endemic venue closures and fatalist doom-scrolling. An era in which the pursuit of happiness, bliss and excitement are forever stalked by shadows of individual comfort and conformity.

Euphoria offers a state of exception: a communism of the emotions that has the power to uplift our souls, ignite revolutions and redefine social bonds. It takes only a breeze, a colour or chord progression to move us from boredom and compliance to a spine-tingling, technicolour world of love, ecstasy and radical communion. A world of gender euphoria, dance, protest, autonomous zones and future utopias, of personal enlightenment and collective transcendence; in which time dilates, emotions surge without direction or aim, bodies dissolve into ecstatic mass and the contours of sense are infinitely redrawn. We come together and stand outside ourselves, released from the constraints of everything that has gone before.

To celebrate its 20th Anniversary Season, Bold Tendencies gathers its 2026 Artistic Programme under the utopian impulse of Euphoria. From the bittersweet highs of teenage love to the sensory bliss of spiritual hideaways, the rush and escape of rhythm and movement to the passionate solidarity of political struggle. Euphoria asserts the possibility of something other, not as a retreat from the world but as a mode of being and being-together that is free, uncompromising and insistently alive. It is at the limits of experience that we are exposed to the poverty of the possible, and where we face the eruptive potential of what lies beyond.