Modern Toss Brings Its 21st Anniversary Exhibition to London

British cartoon duo Modern Toss have brought their 21st anniversary exhibition, Having an Exhibition Yeah?, to London. The show opened at Drawing Room in Bermondsey on August 14 and runs until September 6, 2026.

Created by Jon Link and Mick Bunnage, Modern Toss has spent more than two decades turning the frustrations, absurdities and bad behaviour of everyday life into cartoons, books, animation and increasingly elaborate physical objects. The London exhibition brings much of that history together, along with new work made for the continuing project.

More than 100 Modern Toss artworks are on display. They range from large-scale paintings and oversized stone heads to token-operated machines, a wind-powered finger sculpture and a five-metre-wide ceiling mobile carrying four life-sized flies. A continuous screening presents 100 selected cartoons alongside animation and live-action work from the Modern Toss archive.

The exhibition is not designed simply as a collection of framed cartoons. Visitors receive tokens with their tickets to operate several of the works, including the Periodic Table of Swearing, one of Modern Toss’s best-known interactive pieces. Jon Link is also holding portrait sessions inside the pair’s custom-built Portrait Booth, drawing visitors from inside the structure before passing the finished portraits through the wall.

One of the new additions in London is the Swear Map, an interactive project developed with the University of Sheffield. Using a telephone receiver and a series of buttons, visitors can hear swear words, insults and expressions collected from different parts of Britain. Modern Toss says the map developed as the exhibition travelled around the country and that the London version brings together voices and dialect gathered along the way.

Behind the joke is a linguistic research project. In April, researchers at the University of Sheffield launched what they describe as the UK’s first national repository of regional swear words. The project asks people to contribute words and phrases used in their own towns and regions, creating a record of local language at a time when some dialect expressions may be disappearing. The university is working with Modern Toss to transform the material into public exhibition pieces.

For Link and Bunnage, the collaboration is also a natural extension of work they have been making for years. Charts, diagrams, bureaucratic formats and supposedly serious systems have long been part of Modern Toss’s humour. The Swear Map takes that approach into a different territory, combining cartoon humour with real linguistic data.

London is the final stop of the current exhibition tour, following earlier appearances elsewhere in Britain. Modern Toss confirmed ahead of the opening that the Drawing Room show would conclude the journey, with the Swear Map joining the exhibition for this final stage.

Modern Toss itself dates back to the early years of the web. Link and Bunnage launched the project as a website in 2002, followed by the first printed Modern Toss comics in 2004. The work later expanded into books, newspaper cartoons and television; the series was adapted for Channel 4 in 2006 and 2007.

That history helps explain why Having an Exhibition Yeah? does not look much like a conventional cartoon retrospective. The drawings remain at its centre, but around them Modern Toss has built machines, sculpture, animation and objects that ask the audience to do more than stand in front of a frame.

Having an Exhibition Yeah? is open at Drawing Room / Tannery Arts in Bermondsey, London, from August 14 to September 6, 2026. The exhibition is ticketed. Drawing Room also advises parental guidance because of explicit language and content.

Sources

Drawing Room — Guest Exhibition: Modern Toss – Having an Exhibition Yeah?
https://drawingroom.org.uk/exhibition/modern-toss/

Modern Toss — Introducing the Drawing Room
https://news.moderntoss.com/p/introducing-the-drawing-room

University of Sheffield — UK’s first-ever national swear word census to capture real use of English language
https://sheffield.ac.uk/news/uks-first-ever-national-swear-word-census-capture-real-use-english-language

Eye Magazine — They work with words: 2
https://eyemagazine.com/feature/article/they-work-with-words-2