UNTITLED: Art on the conditions of our time

10 Jun-3 Oct 2021

Overview

Kettle’s Yard is pleased to present UNTITLED: Art on the conditions of our time. 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.

Curator Paul Goodwin has said:

“This exhibition takes a bold curatorial approach to the often paradoxical question of curating ‘black survey shows’. Instead of focusing on blackness ahead of the works themselves, Untitled flips this order and focuses on the works first and foremost. Questions of blackness, race and identity are then shown to be entangled in the multitude of concerns – aesthetic, material and political – that viewers can encounter without the curatorial voice obscuring the works.”