Elevating the Everyday:
Moving Images in the Shop Window

Dee Honeybun
PhD. Viva Exhibition
8-26 September 2025
Exhibition closed Wednesday 10th September 2025.

Bringing together five-years of PhD practice-based research, Elevating the Everyday is an exploration of Moving Images in the Shop Window. Across city-centre retail streets, light-emitting digital displays in the shop windows of fashion stores show bodies in motion. In the digital window display, scale, movement and emitted light replace or supplement human-sized mannequins. Relatable video content mirrors the life of the consumer to describe us in new ways; the everyday is elevated as spectacle, given status through underlying structures of consumerism and through our complicity when engaging with contemporary spaces of consumption. This new form of image-led consuming calls into question what is at stake when our everyday is reframed through spectacle.

Between 2020 and 2025, Dee Honeybun walked along London’s Oxford Street, between Tottenham Court and Oxford Circus, and Carnaby Street. This exhibition is a response to this walk, and what was observed. The city-centre retail space is explored through the everyday act of walking, a pedestrian movement that reflects the activity of window shopping. The walks are documented using digital video, engaging with the commercial use of moving images in retail space. A process of cropping and layering selected video sequences explores the overlaps, inconsistencies and nuances of the contemporary everyday of the retail street.

The onscreen body plays a key role in bringing merchandise to life. Rooted in everyday movement, post-modern movement practice investigates the onscreen body in real space. To accompany the exhibition, during the private view, a structured improvisation will be performed by Dee Honeybun and movement practitioner Sassirika Lam (who brought her expertise in movement practice to this research).

Performance: 9th September 2025, 18.00-18.15
Structured Improvisation | Digital projection with live duet

Between 2021 and 2025, Dee Honeybun and Sassirika Lam met to explore the digital onscreen body through their bodies in real space. Responding initially to spectacle, it was within small, ordinary movements that the relevance and the richness of the everyday was revealed. The performance takes the form of a structured improvisation and is a response to the digital shop window of fashion and homeware retailer Next. A movement-language, developed from the onscreen movements, forms the starting point for this performance. 

Bio

Dee Honeybun is a lens-based artist and researcher working with digital moving-image and photography. Based in London, her practice explores twenty-first century urban spaces by means of encounters through the body. Of interest to Dee are the spaces where people gather, whether to rest, to catch-up or to shop.  Recordings gathered by visiting and revisiting city centre spaces are cropped and layered to explore relations between the body, urban space, and the everyday.

Website: deehoneybun.com
Instagram: @honeybeepix