Archives: Events

The exhibition, ‘Silence is a Powerful Sound’ by  Ann Christopher, is a poignant and evocative show that features a series of new sculptures, works on paper, and selected pieces from previous decades. The title ‘Silence is a Powerful Sound’ reflects Ann’s personal journey over the past three years.

This major new exhibition, Land, Sea and Sky, brings together three artists who, although working more than 200 years apart, are connected through their close observation of nature and skilful use of materials.    Margaret Pollard, a multi-media artist and photographer, presents Three Drops of Blood, a recent body of work, which draws on two years of research that unearthed the folk histories of Devon’s botanical gardens and ferns.  Vija Celmins shows the deep focus and exceptional skill she’s sustained for more than six decades, as her intense images bring a careful focus to seemingly limitless aspects of nature from the sea and deserts, to the night sky.  Lastly, there are watercolours, paintings and prints by JMW Turner (1775-1851), from the gallery’s art collection and on loan from Tate. These depict waves, wind, clouds and skies, showing how he captured the essence of both land and sea before the invention of photography.

The exhibition, Visions of English Literature, casts a spotlight on Paula Rego’s remarkable practice as a graphic artist, and in particular the British literary influences that inspired her most ambitious bodies of works in printmaking: Nursery Rhymes, Peter Pan and Jane Eyre. Showcasing each series of prints combined with unseen preparatory sketches, etching plates and other ephemera; this rare exhibition offers an insight into how Rego transforms this material into startlingly original and unexpected pictures.

Letizia Battaglia’s photographic career began in the early 1970s, when she was in her forties. She documented everyday life, alongside the brutal reality of the Mafia and their victims in Sicily, during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Her images are some of the best-known records of life in the shadow of the Mafia. In her relentless pursuit against organised crime, she used her camera to document the daily terror, putting it on the front page.

This Fashion Commission, Socks: The Art of Care and Repair, by Celia Pym, focusses on the concept of sustainability in fashion and our lives more broadly.  The exhibition celebrates the everyday act of mending through darning.

The idea behind Socks: The Art Of Care And Repair is to encourage a feeling of resilience, to be able to mend something; to play creatively with colour and yarn, and to foster a sense of care for ourselves, our clothes, the environment, and the people around us.

Anya Gallaccio: Preserve is an exhibition spanning three decades of Gallaccio’s radical practice, it restages several iconic sculptures in addition to a new site-specific commission.   The exhibition reveals the artist’s consistent rethinking of the relationship between art and the environment, by presenting works that connect with Kent’s natural heritage.

Margot Samel’s exhibition Narcissister, focusses on race, gender, and sexuality through a constant renegotiation of the self, and its inherent performative nature within contemporary society against heteronormative structures of surveillance and policing.

In her work Lauren Halsey merges past, present and future via her interest in iconography connected to the African diaspora, Black and queer icons and architecture. Halsey cites the collective sonic and visual layering associated with funk music as the blueprint for her approach to making, traversing time and drawing on a wide range of sources.  In emajendat, her exhibition, she transforms the Gallery into an immersive ‘Funk garden’ that responds to the building’s location in Kensington Gardens, offering an extension of the park into the galleries.

Aziza Kadyri’s practice blends forms and materials, including experimental costume design, textiles, performance, installation art and virtual and augmented reality. In her exhibition, Spinning Tales, Kadyri uses technology and various artistic disciplines, such as multilayered language forms, to explore the Eurasian region’s critical heritage, complex contemporaneity and current nation-state layout.

Grey Unpleasant Land, is a collaborative exhibition by Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane.  The exhibition examines the myth of England as a nation, and combines a range of media—including historical artefacts, speculative narratives, petitions to patrons and a deed of gift.  The artists provide a unique lens through which to investigate the complex and often troubling nature of England’s cultural and historical landscape.