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IN SEARCH OF CHEMOZOA : BOREDOMRESEARCH
May 19 - Jul 18, 2021
Developed during residencies at the Arizona Cancer Evolution Center (USA) and at Portsmouth's art gallery Aspex, the multi-channel video responds to new therapeutic approaches centred on managing rather than curing cancer.
 
In Search of Chemozoa is a poetic response to world leading research studying cancer across species. Combining computer animation with film from inside laboratories and in natural environments, boredomresearch present ideas for an alternative cultural understanding of cancer. Informed by interviews with over 20 scientists, the film presents an original view of the relationship between the latest cancer research and developing theories about biomedical and ecological health.
 
boredomresearch is a collaboration between British artists Vicky Isley and Paul Smith. Internationally renowned for exploring an understanding of the natural world through new media technologies, boredomresearch won the Moving Image Lumen Prize in 2016 and have recently been commissioned for the Human Cell Atlas global public engagement project, collaborating with scientists at the University of Oxford.
 
In Search of Chemozoa was commissioned and funded by the Arizona Cancer Evolution Center at the Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, developed in partnership with Aspex and supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

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LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL: THE STOMACH AND THE PORT
Mar 20 - Sep 5, 2021
The 11th edition, The Stomach and the Port, explores notions of the body and ways of connecting with the world. More than 50 international artists have been invited to respond to this theme within the context of Liverpool. A dynamic programme of free exhibitions, performances, screenings and fringe events unfolds over the 15 weeks, shining a light on the city’s vibrant cultural scene.
 
The artists exhibiting at Bluecoat also acknowledge the kinship attachments between humans and nature. Paintings by Jadé Fadojutimi explore how bodies and nature are in constant flux, with our identities continuously being shaped by our environments. Films including Jíibie (2019) by Laura Huertas Millán and Fog Dog (2020) by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, together with sculptural works by Roland Persson, Kathleen Ryan and André Romão, propose ways in which we belong to the world beyond our physicalboundaries, considering ourselves as nature, not just part of it.

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QUEER THE PIER
To Feb 2022
This community curated display peers into local LGBTIQA+ history. Celebrating the lives of the writers, artists, performers, activists and ordinary people who have made Brighton & Hove so fabulous, their stories are brought to life with film and photography, fashion and drag and oral histories.

DESIGNING AN ENCHANTED PALACE: THE CRACE DECORATORS
May 18 - Sep 1, 2021
This new display reveals around 50 rarely seen original designs for the Royal Pavilion interiors dating from the early 19th century, and gives an intimate insight into how the Royal Pavilion interiors were created by decorators John and Frederick Crace under George IV. Also on show are Asian porcelain, enamels, glass paintings, hand painted wallpaper and images of China that inspired the Craces’ work.

SPENCER GORE & FRIENDS: DOWN FROM LONDON
May 18 - Dec 1, 2021
Over a hundred years after their landmark exhibition surprised and delighted Edwardian Brighton, this colourful display revisits the influential work of the Camden Town Group. Explore the passions and principles driving the friends to use bold styles and colour to transform English painting in the early 20th century. The highlight is the newly acquired Spencer Gore painting The West Pier, Brighton, 1913.

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GEORGE EKSTS: FIVE THINGS TO SEE OR DO
May 1 - Jul 4, 2021

FIONA CURRAN: JUMP CUT, STILL LIFE
May 20 - Jul 1, 2021 FINAL WEEK
Jump Cut, Still Life will present a series of works exploring landscape and the impacts of screen-based technologies on our sensory engagement with the natural world. The works in the exhibition developed from the artist’s experience of being in her garden during lockdown, witnessing plants growing, observing insects and birds visiting and noticing the subtle changes in temperature and light. These works record Curran’s experience of slowing down and paying attention to the changing of the seasons whilst reflecting more broadly on notions of loss and change at a human and non-human scale.
 
Fiona Curran (b.1971 Manchester) read Philosophy at the University of Manchester before studying at Manchester School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, she teaches at the Royal College of Art in London, lives in Hertfordshire and works from her studio at Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge. Fiona has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including solo exhibitions at Cornerhouse Manchester, Chapter Gallery, Cardiff, MAC, Birmingham and Touchstones, Rochdale. Fiona has also undertaken a series of site-specific public art projects for organisations including the National Trust, Kielder Forest Trust and Vital Arts, she is currently working on a sculptural commission with the Contemporary Art Society for Eddington in Cambridge.

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ALL IN THE SAME STORM: PANDEMIC PATCHWORK STORIES
May 19 - Aug 30, 2021
Set against the traumatic backdrop of COVID-19 and the resulting need for individuals and communities to support one another through it, the Refugee Buddy Project, Hastings, Rother & Wealden initiated an online version of Stitch for Change, a project that began in late 2019 to bring people together through storytelling and making.
 
They received 95 patchwork squares from people across the community, including those seeking refuge, volunteers, and students from a Hastings-based FE College. This collaboration tells diverse stories of life under the shadow of COVID-19 through hand-stitched patchwork squares that reveal tales of resistance, change, togetherness, isolation, loss and home.
 
The patches, once sewn together, form four large quilts: a people’s history of a pandemic that sits within the long tradition of hand-stitching as a method of narrating individual and collective life under oppressive, unsettling circumstances.

HOLLY HENDRY: INDIFFERENT DEEP
May 19 - Aug 30, 2021
This summer, the De La Warr Pavilion will host two major new projects by artist Holly Hendry addressing subjects that include borders, edges, bodies and machines.
 
Her solo exhibition in the Ground floor gallery, Indifferent Deep, features a host of sculptures situated within an apparently half-eaten landscape, while a major new public artwork, titled Invertebrate, burrows through the building’s rooftop and balconies, emerging on the lawn outside.
 
Holly Hendry imagines the De La Warr Pavilion being chewed up. Almost 100 years ago, in 1923, its architect Erich Mendelsohn spoke about machines and buildings as part of a network of ‘organisms’ that continue to evolve according to human need. Altering in relation to their surroundings, living organisms grow, consume energy and decay: the Pavilion’s position on the coastline is vulnerable due to rising sea levels, and rough sea winds can erode the clean lines of its modern structure. Extending Mendelsohn’s idea, Hendry visualises the De La Warr Pavilion’s ‘body’ becoming porous before dissolving into its surroundings. Invertebrate’s journey will tear holes in the gallery’s walls, revealing the Pavilion’s fragility and making it into a vessel whose leaks and holes cause artworks, the building and its surroundings to appear and disappear from view, while blurring the boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

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KURT TONG: IN CASE IT RAINS IN HEAVEN
May 21 - Aug 1, 2021
Tong’s photographs present the Chinese tradition of Joss paper offerings to the dead, asking what we might want to provide for our loved ones in the afterlife
press release

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GRAYSON PERRY: THE VANITY OF SMALL DIFFERENCES
May 18 - Jul 3, 2021
Perry’s large-scale tapestries were inspired by William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress and chart a “class journey” through Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells, and The Cotswolds for the television series All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry, first aired on Channel 4 in June 2012.
 
In the series, Perry “goes on safari” to gather inspiration for his artwork; weaving the characters he meets into a narrative, with an attention to the minutiae of contemporary taste every bit as acute as that in Hogarth’s 18th century paintings.
 
Each measuring 2m x 4m, the tapestries take on an art form traditionally associated with grand houses—depicting classical myths, historical and religious scenes, and epic battles.
 
They play with the idea of using this ancient allegorical art to elevate the commonplace dramas of modern British life. Politics, consumerism, history, and art history are bound up in the work, in both subject and medium.

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SOFT BOYS : KIARA MOHAMED, FAUZIYA JOHNSON
May 19 - Aug 29, 2021
“When you’re so used to trauma, actively seeking joy - and basking in it - feels so foreign. But joy is the framework through which we can re-learn the world.” - Kiara Mohamed
 
Kiara Mohamed’s work examines the ways we exist alongside one another and our environment, as well as what happens when we readdress our traumas through moments of radical joy. In his work, joy becomes a political act: a way of bringing meaning, beauty, and value to places that have been damaged by human or natural acts. Kiara’s films champion care and mindfulness and explore how art can allow for transformation, adaptation and healing.
 
Soft Boys is a short film about queer and trans joy, specifically through and within the Somali culture and community. By re-engaging with Somalian traditional dances, cooking practices and garments, Kiara connects with his nomadic ancestors, and to a heritage from which he had always been made to feel excluded. In this solo exhibition, Kiara’s new work highlights how modern concepts of masculinity can be surprisingly conservative, even within the trans community. The experimental documentary questions what it means to be a man by focusing on emotion, empathy and joy.
 
Soft Boys is curated in collaboration with Liverpool-based curator, cultural organiser and artist Fauziya Johnson. Discover more about the artwork, exhibition and the process of making it in a special podcast with Kiara and Fauziya. The discussion between artist and curator will be released in March 2021.

LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2021 : THE STOMACH AND THE PORT
May 19 - Aug 29, 2021
Looking at new ways of connecting our bodies with the world, FACT presents a newly commissioned audio-visual installation by Turner Prize nominees Black Obsidian Sound System, as well as a new film series created by artist, Zheng Bo.

FACT TOGETHER
May 19 - Aug 29, 2021
During 2020, FACT Together created a platform for 10 artists based in the North of England to present work online in response to the financial uncertainty caused by Covid-19 and the temporary closure of galleries and museums across the world.
 
Each of the artists selected created a new work within the theme of The Living Planet, the focus of FACT’s programme for 2020. This programme explores the ways in which wildlife, plantlife and other ecological systems have responded to the impacts of our actions and how we need to approach the natural world, and those who live in it, from a different perspective.
 
FACT Together artists received a grant, plus 3 months of professional development and support from the team at FACT to create artworks from home. Many of these artists had not previously created digital work, and the resulting projects include a podcast, games, short films, social media takeovers, interactive artworks, poetic interventions into digital diaries, workshops and more.
 
In this exhibition, we present a series of images, taken from each of the artworks, as well as a hidden Augmented Reality (AR) layer that can be activated during your visit.

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ROSA-JOHAN UDDOH: PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
May 19 - Aug 29, 2021
Focal Point Gallery is delighted to present the first institutional exhibition of new work by Rosa-Johan Uddoh, an interdisciplinary artist working towards radical self-love, inspired by black feminist practice and writing.
 
‘Practice Makes Perfect’ explores the relationship of childhood education with popular ideas of the British nation, and how this forms British subjects. This develops Uddoh’s practice exploring the effects of ‘black British’ popular culture on self-formation. Responding to the current debates about black history within the National Curriculum and urban space, Uddoh has approached the creation of new work for this exhibition as therapeutic ‘wish fulfilment’ in a time of uncertainty in education and wider racial tension.
 
During Autumn 2020, Rosa-Johan Uddoh worked with Year 8 pupils at Chase Secondary School in Southend-on-Sea to create performance-to-camera videos, developed through a series of workshops that considered the content and format of Uddoh’s written work, WINDRUSH: A TONGUE TWISTER, as a means to express the wishes of the young participants around a diverse curriculum. Investigating the importance of the school experience and ‘rehearsing’ as ‘becoming’ or gaining subjectivity, this exhibition shares a collaborative process of acting on the potential of a dream education, according to the possibilities of the school schedule and the public gallery setting.

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THE TRINITY BUOY WHARF DRAWING PRIZE 2021
May 17 - Jul 2, 2021
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2020 exhibition includes 71 drawings by 56 practitioners - including works by students to those by established artists and makers – selected from 4,274 submissions received from across the UK and internationally.
 
Supported by the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust, the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize has been led by its founding Director, Professor Anita Taylor, Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee, since 1994. The 2020 exhibition marks the third year of support for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize by Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust, and the 25th consecutive annual open drawing exhibition held since it was founded in 1994.
 
The independent Selection Panels comprised Sophia Yadong Hao, Principal Curator of Cooper Gallery at University of Dundee; Ian McKeever RA, artist; and Frances Morris, Director of Tate Modern. The Working Drawing display and award was selected by Sir Ian Blatchford, Director of the Science Museum; Piers Gough CBE RA, architect; and Sophie McKinlay, Director of Programme at V&A Dundee.
 
The exhibition includes drawings by artists, designers and makers at all stages of their careers - from students to established artists - located across the UK, as well as in France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands and Turkey. The selected works create a diverse exhibition that reflects a broad scope of contemporary drawing practice.
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COOKING SECTIONS: THE EMPIRE REMAINS SHOP FRANCHISE AGREEMENT
Jun 14, 2019 - Jun 1, 2022
A rotating programme of small-scale visual and sound installations in the future home of Grand Union.
 
The Empire Remains Shop Franchise Agreement is an invitation for institutions, collectives, or individuals to construct their own counterpart: to reflect on imperial legacies and the commodification of their own structures and infrastructures.

A SIMULTANEITY OF STORIES-SO-FAR
May 19 - Jul 31, 2021
'A simultaneity of stories-so-far' is an exhibition of sound, video and writing by artists Lucy Reynolds, Navi Kaur and Holly Argent. Curated by Laura Onions and Alice O’Rourke, the project will re-consider acts of gathering and articulating collective stories. Cultivated throughout the last year, stories-so-far brings to attention how place is given resonance through joined together voices.
 
Stemming from Grand Union’s 10th year anniversary, each contribution to the exhibition offers propositions for locating, reflecting, pausing and appreciating how we become mapped into places overtime. Taken up in feminist literature, the figure of the map stands for past rigidities that can also be reworked from within, open to the fragments, incoherences and connections yet to be made. “Perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far” a thought from geographer Doreen Massey in her book ‘For Space’ which encourages a thinking of space as a result of interrelations between people and place. By working with people and stories – as opposed to conventional archival objects – this exhibition acts as a marker of our existence and a method of making ourselves and others more visible.

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QUENTIN BLAKE: WE LIVE IN WORRYING TIMES
May 27 - Jul 1, 2021 FINAL WEEK
Sir Quentin Blake’s We Live in Worrying Times returns for Hastings Contemporary’s reopening on Thursday 27 May. This timely body of work is as raw, original and unlikely as anything Sir Quentin has produced in eight decades of creativity. A brand new collection of work, Hand in Hand, will also be on display from 27 May 2021.
 
At the beginning of 2020 Sir Quentin Blake created a new body of work themed around concern for the state of the world. The resulting exhibition, We Live in Worrying Times, was originally planned for spring 2020 but had to be postponed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Many of the exhibition’s themes have a marked resonance with the present global situation.
 
With We Live in Worrying Times, Sir Quentin explores subject matter and techniques that feel both familiar and radically different, both dream-like and introspective. Displaced figures trudge landscapes blasted by war or ecological crisis as sinister-looking drones haunt the skies above. The anxious and bewildered faces of ‘Apprehensive Girls and Women’ and ‘Unfortunates’ appear alongside grotesques Sir Quentin has called ‘Eroded Heads’.
 
At the centre of the exhibition is The Taxi Driver, a thirty-by-five foot mural, made in a single day at Hastings Contemporary, that pays homage to Picasso’s Guernica. Sir Quentin was inspired to create the work after an encounter with a London taxi driver who – lamenting that ‘we live in worrying times’ – encouraged Sir Quentin to take up the mantle of artist-hero and produce ‘a new Guernica‘, an outcry against the encroaching global disasters of the near future. To the artist, the encounter felt like a dream; he asked for the man’s name so that he could let him know what happened, but the driver replied that it wasn’t necessary, as he “kept an eye on everything anyway”.

SEASIDE MODERN: ART AND LIFE ON THE BEACH
May 27 - Sep 26, 2021
With staycations booming and forecasters predicting a surge in the popularity of traditional seaside resorts, curator James Russell takes a fresh look at the popularity of the British seaside in the first half of the 20th century.
 
Workers took advantage of their newly-gained holidays to flock to the coasts, and young sophisticates cast aside Victorian attitudes to nudity and donned fashionable beachwear. Through their own exploration of the landscapes and inhabitants of the seashore, artists established the British beach as an essential site of the development of Modern British art.
 
This lively exhibition will feature work by major modern British artists including Paul Nash, LS Lowry, Eileen Agar and Laura Knight, as well as advertising posters and archive photographs.

SEAWALL
May 29 - Jul 1, 2021 FINAL WEEK
Seawall considers the encroaching ocean and the ongoing discussion around climate change, coastal erosion, and the physical and political impact this has on a place. Angelidakis will use the human response to flooding through the invention of sea defence mechanisms to ask, ‘can the border between land and sea become a habitable place?’
 
England’s Creative Coast is a landmark project between seven outstanding arts organisations. Seven new, site-specific artworks by seven international contemporary artists – Andreas Angelidakis, Mariana Castillo Deball, Holly Hendry, Jasleen Kaur, Katrina Palmer, Pilar Quinteros and Michael Rakowitz – will connect the coastlines of Essex, Kent and East Sussex from May to November 2021.
 
Curated by Tamsin Dillon, the Waterfronts series of works will be in Margate, Folkestone, Hastings, Bexhill-on-Sea, Eastbourne, Gravesend and Southend-on-Sea.
 
Seawall will be outside the gallery on its east side.

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GUSTAV METZGER
Jun 26 - Sep 1, 2021

EDUARDO CHILLIDA
Jun 26, 2021 - Jan 3, 2022
One of the foremost Spanish sculptors of the twentieth century, Eduardo Chillida (1924 – 2002) is widely celebrated for his monumental public sculptures and enduring fascination with interconnected shape, space and
organic form. Chillida challenged the constraints of materials such as iron and steel to redefine the language of postwar sculpture, drawing on a deep connection to his native Basque region. Chillida’s public sculptures were
commissioned globally and he travelled extensively to Paris, Greece, Umbria, Tuscany, Rome and Provence, each informing new artistic paths. Hauser & Wirth will present a significant body of sculptural works and drawings
displayed throughout the original farm buildings and surrounding outdoor landscape in Somerset. The exhibition will invite new encounters between Chillida’s work and the unique environment of Hauser & Wirth Somerset,
drawing parallels with the artist’s own vision for Chillida Leku, a public museum and sculpture park created during his lifetime that expanded the relationship between art and nature. Large and medium-sized sculptures ranging
from the illuminated appearance of alabaster, to the raw quality of granite, chamotte clay and iron, will be on view throughout the Threshing Barn, Pigsty and Workshop galleries. The sculptural presentation will be complemented
by a selection of paper works, including suspended Gravitations and figurative drawings verging on abstraction.
 
Hauser & Wirth supported the reopening of Chillida Leku in 2019 in order to share the artist’s life and practice with wider audiences, working closely with Chillida’s family and the local community to preserve the artist’s legacy. This will be the first cultural exchange project of its kind with the museum and the gallery in the UK, including a collaborative education and events programme over an extended six-month period.

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A COLLECTION FOR WAKEFIELD
Permanent display (admission free)
Wakefield’s art collection, now cared for by The Hepworth Wakefield, was founded in 1923 with the aim to nurture a public understanding of contemporary art and its relations to modern life. Wakefield Art Gallery gave particular support to emerging local artists Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, acquiring their work early in their careers.
Since opening in 2011, The Hepworth Wakefield has maintained this tradition of supporting artists and championing emerging talent, as well continuing to collect works by the most prominent British artists of the 20th century.
On display are recent acquisitions of work by artists including Wilfred Avery, Alan Reynolds and Jennifer Lee, alongside paintings by Maggi Hambling, Howard Hodgkin, L.S. Lowry and Yorkshire-born artist John Atkinson Grimshaw. A recently conserved sculpture by Kim Lim, is presented in dialogue with a late marble work by Hepworth, highlighting both artists’ interests in relationships between abstract art and nature.

BARBARA HEPWORTH: ART & LIFE
May 21, 2021 - Feb 27, 2022
This exhibition is a survey of Hepworth’s extraordinary career, from early work produced while growing up in Wakefield, to the iconic stringed sculptures and large-scale carvings made towards the end of her life.

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EXHIBITIONS TBA
May 1 - Jul 1, 2021 FINAL WEEK

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MORGAN QUAINTANCE: MISSING TIME
May 1 - Jun 30, 2021 FINAL WEEK

LISA WATTS & DAD: MY CRAZY FAMILY GOLF
Jun 1 - Jul 10, 2021

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ALFRED WALLIS REDISCOVERED
May 19 - Jul 10, 2021
Alfred Wallis’ (1855-1942) expressive drawings and paintings capture the immediacy of his direct experiences of the sea. Wallis lived in Cornwall throughout his life, working on deep sea fishing boats and then as a marine scrap merchant. He turned to painting when he was in his seventies and with no formal training, and used this creative outlet as a means to escape the isolation and loneliness that he felt following the passing of his wife. In his final year of his life, Wallis lived in a workhouse and here, with materials gifted to him by artist Ben Nicholson and art critic Adrian Stokes, he continued to recall and sketch his memories of the sea, shore and Cornish landscape.
 
Three sketchbooks made in his final year (1941-2), that are filled with drawings and paintings in varying styles, are the catalyst for this exhibition. Alfred Wallis Rediscovered will explore Wallis’ paintings from the Kettle’s Yard Collection, with particular attention to his later works and drawing practices. Wallis’ close friendship with the creator of Kettle’s Yard, Jim Ede, who purchased large numbers of the artist’s paintings in the 1930s, is demonstrated through their lively letter correspondence, which will be on display. Ben Nicholson described Wallis’ work in 1942 as ‘an immensely real experience’. This exhibition will shine new light on this innovative artist whose contribution to the development of modern art in Britain deserves closer attention.
 
FREE, booking required
press release

UNTITLED: ART ON THE CONDITIONS OF OUR TIME
Jun 10 - Oct 3, 2021
This exhibition brings together work by 10 British African diaspora artists with a focus on how their innovative practices ask important questions about some of the most important cultural and political issues of our turbulent times. The exhibition will feature new commissions by Barby Asante, Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom and NT, as well as new and recent work by Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Phoebe Boswell, Kimathi Donkor, Evan Ifekoya, Cedar Lewisohn, Harold Offeh and Ima-Abasi Okon. Painting, drawing and printmaking sits alongside performance, video and sound installation.
 
The exhibition title refers to the longstanding art historical convention of leaving artworks ‘untitled’ in order to encourage attention onto the works themselves, and eliminate reliance upon contextual information. Untitled asks viewers to examine the conditions of our time through the prism of Black British artists working today, without reducing the encounter solely to an exploration of Black British identity. By avoiding such over-contextualisation, the exhibition seeks to foreground these artists’ practices and show how they create platforms for audiences to explore the connections between art, culture and society.

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ZADIE XA
May 18 - Sep 4, 2021
'Moon Poetics 4 Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers' is an immersive exhibition.

GEORGINA STARR : QUARANTAINE
May 18 - Sep 4, 2021

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