In June 2022 we held our first ever Secret Showcase, celebrating the success of graduating students across the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Featuring an on-campus exhibition and performances, with two special events over two evenings, as well as film screenings at a local venue, our first Secret Showcase received over 1000 visitors during its two-week runtime.
Colleagues from the creative and cultural industries and beyond came together to join our students at a preview event, to uncover the unexpected, remake old connections and forge new ones.
To find out more about events like the Secret Showcase, complete the sign-up form at the bottom of our homepage.
2022 Secret Showcase Programme intro:
"Welcome to our Secret Showcase. The graduating students from our three schools are delighted to present their work to you. Their work reflects those societal, cultural, and economic issues they care about and is both personal and individual. It is exciting, ambitious, and innovative and expressed through all forms of media from performance, music, writing and creative art and design practice.
"We are immensely proud of every one of our students and their achievements as they prepare for the next stage in their career. All this isn’t possible without the support of our friends and partners beyond ARU. A big thank you to everyone who has sponsored students, set live/industry briefs and competitions or given their time to talk to our students. This is a valuable part of being a student in Arts Humanities and Social Sciences... we are very grateful."
Professor Sally Wade Pro Vice Chancellor/Dean Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Competition winners
Awards ceremonies were also held at the Secret Showcase for the winners of our annual art competitions.
Simona Racheva took away this year's £3000 Supanee Gazeley Fine Art Prize, awarded for the best body of work exhibited at the BA Fine Art Degree Show at ARU. Her major project work consisted of a series of small-scale text works that combine printmaking (Letterpress) and embossing, and canvases with painted areas of text, exploring the presence of duality in society by overlapping texts with opposite meanings.
The Content Creation Award, judged by Cambridge-based digital marketing agency Sookio, went to BA (Hons) Digital Media Production students Dina Mateus and Rasny Baia Cabral De Magalhaes. The pair won the prize for major project work that focused on marketing for Rasny's fashion house Rey Collection, including social media strategies, rebranding, visual identity, website, photography and video campaigns.
BA (Hons) Digital Media Production student Cliona Juniper (a.k.a. CJ Faichney) picked up the Creative Tech Award, judged by Cambridge-based arts organisation Collusion. CJ's major project continued a joint university collaboration live brief called “New Canterbury Tales,” and included building a world within Minecraft based on the stories and lore about its inhabitants.