A View Through the Window opened at St. Margaret’s House in Bethnal Green on 4 April 2025, presenting fifteen international artists under one unifying theme – the view from the window. The three-day exhibition, curated by Irina Pashina through Amove Gallery, ran until 6 April in the building’s Grade II listed Chapel at 21 Old Ford Road, London E2 9PL. Admission was free and no booking was required (St. Margaret’s House).
The exhibition positioned the window not as a passive frame but as an active threshold. According to the event listing, it offered “a diverse range of perspectives through visual storytelling,” treating the window as a metaphor for reflection, imagination and present-day perception. The fifteen participating artists – IRINIR, Gleb Skubachevsky, Olga Beketova, Valeria Ocean, Natalia Olmez, Natalia Largina, Fatima Erkenova, Zanna Loichenko, Oksana Muratova, Nataliia Pivovarova, Umut Mambetova, Vladislav Chernyavsky, Aitbubu Badakhanova, Bolobek Mambetov, and Madina Psianchina – represented multiple countries and artistic disciplines, from painting to tactile installation.
Pashina, who founded Amove Gallery and registered it as a private limited company in October 2024 at Companies House (company number 16028675), has described the window motif as central to her curatorial approach. The original Creativity’s UK preview quoted her stating, “Windows are thresholds where vulnerability meets possibility.” The gallery, based at 27-43 Eastern Road, St James House, Romford, RM1 3NH, had by that point established itself as a vehicle for international group exhibitions at non-traditional London venues (Companies House).
Fatima Erkenova, one of the featured artists, arrived in the United Kingdom on a Global Talent visa in 2023. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and works as a Gestalt therapist, while also maintaining a Kyokushin karate practice at fourth-dan level. Her artistic output spans painting and graphic art, and her work had previously been shown in Russia, Luxembourg and across Europe before her London move. She describes her practice as an effort to “show in my creativity the connection of worlds through balance and freedom” (ArtMajeur). Erkenova’s participation in A View Through the Window marked one of her first major London group appearances after relocating to the capital.
IRINIR, another exhibitor, presents textural and materially dense paintings. Her work Deep into the Ocean appears on the Artsy platform, and she later contributed to the February 2026 collaboration between Amove Gallery and Visionary Art Gallery at the same Chapel venue (Visionary Art).
The opening night on 4 April operated as a VIP preview from 18:00 to 20:30. Writer Elena Tolokonnikova contributed a live story installation, weaving fiction through the gallery space while artists gave candid talks. Across 5 and 6 April, the programme shifted to public hours from 11:00 to 18:00, featuring curator-led tours and artist workshops on translating emotion into form (Creativity’s UK).
St. Margaret’s House provided a context layered with social history. Founded in 1889 as the Bethnal Green Ladies’ Committee under Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, it moved to 21 Old Ford Road in 1903. The Chapel was dedicated on St Margaret’s Day in June 1904 by Bishop Winnington Ingram. During the Second World War, the building survived bombing despite an incendiary bomb landing on the Chapel roof. In 2023, St. Margaret’s House gained Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation status, cementing its role as an arts and wellbeing hub in Tower Hamlets (St. Margaret’s House).
The window as an artistic concept carries centuries of weight. Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435 description of a painting as a window onto another world dominated Western art for five centuries. The Whitney Museum addressed this lineage in its December 2024 programme, tracing how twentieth-century modernism disrupted the convention (Whitney Museum).
The participating artists came from backgrounds spanning Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Names such as Aitbubu Badakhanova, Bolobek Mambetov and Madina Psianchina point to Kyrgyz heritage, while Gleb Skubachevsky, Oksana Muratova and Nataliia Pivovarova suggest Ukrainian or Russian origins. The exhibition assembled artists for whom the window carries particular resonance as a boundary between displacement and belonging.
For Pashina, the show represented the first of several group exhibitions at St. Margaret’s House. The February 2026 Trajectories of Life exhibition, featuring many of the same artists, confirmed the Chapel as a recurring venue. That continuity suggests the April 2025 show was less a one-off event than the opening chapter of an ongoing curatorial relationship.
A View Through the Window closed on 6 April 2025. The works departed, but the question it posed – what do we see when we look through a window, and what looks back – remained lodged in the Chapel’s quiet space.
