SMC, Postgraduate Class of 2025 Exhibition

The School of Media and Communication’s 2025 MA Showcase, held from 3 - 9 October 2025, brought together the work of graduating students across seven postgraduate courses in a compelling, multi-sensory exhibition. A lively Friends and Family Day and a well-attended Industry Celebration closed the week, marking not just the culmination of the students’ work, but a collective step into the professional worlds they are poised to enter.

The showcase presented a sharp and considered mix of physical, digital and immersive work, with the school, on its own for the first time, taking over all three floors of public gallery spaces. A standout installation was Uncanny Valley, a commissioned film diptych, Directed by Thomas Alexander. Projection-mapped across the curved staircase of the main atrium, it blurred the boundaries between costume, performance and digital image, utilising photogrammetry and the building's architecture to create a vast and immersive installation. Its scale and ambition set the tone for the wider exhibition: complex, technically ambitious, and conceptually rigorous.

Each course contributed a distinct perspective. Fashion Journalism and Content Creation used an interactive double projection to display digital magazines, layered with curated editorial imagery. A free printed newspaper, TMI, compiled by Course Leader Andrew Tucker and featuring student articles, offered a physical anchor to the work. Part archive, part takeaway, and entirely fitting for an audience keen to linger over ideas.

On the Fashion Media and Communication course, students presented films via interactive screens, demonstrating an experimental approach to emerging technologies and the shaping of new fashion experiences. The work sat at the intersection of media, space and storytelling: provocative, forward-facing, and grounded in visual research.

Fashion Cultures and Histories' 17,000 word dissertations, were presented via bespoke posters showcasing dissertation titles and excerpts, paired with QR codes linking to full texts. Animated versions of the posters were voiced through AI narration - a quiet intervention that invited slow engagement in contrast to the faster-paced installations around it.

In the main gallery, Fashion Photography had a strong visual presence. Four large interactive screens displayed the breadth of the cohort’s work, while a centre-line hang of one striking image per student, asserted the power of still image in an increasingly moving-image world.

The Fashion, Film and Digital Production students work was a curated spatial experience with layered viewing areas: an interactive screen, three plinth-based monitors visible from above, and a panoramic wall of fashion film posters. Screenings in the lecture theatre cinema were followed by audience Q&As, adding an industry-facing platform to the showcase and giving visitors access to the concepts behind the films.

Costume Design for Performance combined physical craftsmanship with digital innovation. Garments were displayed alongside student-produced films, sitting in dialogue with Uncanny Valley, which emerged directly from the work of this cohort - a layered, collaborative gesture that exemplified the show’s cross-disciplinary ethos.

Fashion Curation and Cultural Programming students developed their own vitrines, showcasing a curated blend of printed, physical and digital materials. Accompanying texts demonstrated critical fluency and audience awareness - fundamental skills for future curators navigating both institutional and independent contexts.

The 2025 MA Showcase presented not just final projects, but a collective proposition about the future of creative practice, rooted in research, realised through technology, and expressed with conviction. The work on display made clear that these graduates are ready to contribute meaningfully to the cultural industries and, more importantly, to question and evolve them.