Lauren Halsey: emajendat

11 Oct 2024-2 Mar 2025

Overview

Serpentine South presents emajendat the first solo exhibition in the UK of Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Halsey. Halsey’s wide-ranging practice is deeply rooted in the neighbourhood of South Central Los Angeles in which her family has lived for generations.

Making immersive installations and stand-alone objects, Halsey archives and remixes the changing signs and symbols populating her environment, offering a celebration of the community’s vitality and a creative form of resistance to its growing gentrification. Her vibrant, energetic work merges past, present and future via her interests in the iconography of ancient cultures in the African diaspora, visionary architecture and the graphic maximalism associated with Funk. At once radical and collaborative, Halsey’s practice extends to Summaeverythang, the community center she founded in 2020 that is ‘dedicated to the empowerment and transcendence of black and brown folks socio-politically, economically, intellectually and artistically’. Halsey will transform the gallery with a new installation.