901 Years Later…

901 Years Later… 27 01 2026.

901 Years Later… is an exhibition by four 3rd-year Fine Art students from the Cambridge School of Art: Zhaniya Amantayeva, Tom Devlin, Arjun Shekhawat and Akshica Stephen.

Taking place in the Leper Chapel, one of the oldest standing buildings in Cambridge, built in 1125 CE as part of a medieval Leprosarium (or a community for Lepers). The exhibition brings contemporary practice into dialogue with a site marked by histories of care, exclusion, faith and endurance.

The exhibition considers culture not as a fixed or singular identity but as something lived and continually reshaped. Each artist comes from a different background, and their works reflect distinct relationships to heritage, displacement, tradition and hybridity. Rather than offering a definitive interpretation of culture, the exhibition foregrounds difference and tension, asking how culture is formed through experience, place and memory.

Installed within the Leper Chapel, some works respond directly to the building’s architectural and historical presence, while others engage broader questions of culture and identity that sit alongside the site rather than being shaped by it.

Through painting, installation, and mixed media, these four artists offer outward-looking explorations of culture as something lived and unfinished. Together, the exhibition forms a constellation of perspectives, inviting viewers to consider how cultural narratives persist, fracture and transform over time.

In the Chapel, Pieces One and Two, 27 01 2026.

In The Chapel, Oil On Canvases, By Thomas W Devlin

The work is concerned with the space between these points: man, door, and witness. On two opposing walls hang two paintings: a man alone in a chapel-like room, and a closed door. The figure looks outward; perhaps at the viewer, perhaps at the door behind them.

The building shaped the piece. The Leper Chapel was created to segregate people affected by leprosy; an illness feared far beyond its real contagion. Their exclusion was social before it was medical, a decision made by communities rather than bodies.

I chose not to mark the man as “a leper.” In life many were isolated without visible difference, and to define him by a condition would repeat that old logic. Instead, the paintings sit with the quieter question of what it means to be placed at a distance, and how easily a viewer can become another wall.