Exhibitions programme 2018

The De La Warr Pavilion opened on December 12, 1935: an architectural embodiment of a socially progressive movement, designed by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff. If the Pavilion is a body, its sweeping staircase must be its spine, and the rooftop foyer a brain. In this brain, a year-long exhibition 1935 (February 24, 2018–January 28, 2019) brings together local cultural, political and social happenings of that year that relate directly and indirectly to exhibitions elsewhere in the building.

2018 began with Fantômas, an exhibition of new work by Caroline Achaintre, in which mask-like creatures occupy plinth-like habitats of pastel hues. For Achaintre, the mask is a place where fantasy and reality can exist simultaneously. Fantômas runs until April 29.

Yemi Awosile’s Digital Native translates experience and memory-pattern into cloth. The exhibition emerges from her 2017 residency at Thornwood Care Home, Bexhill, working collaboratively with residents living with dementia. Until  April 15.

Together and separately, Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj explore residual histories of art, design and architecture, exposing unexpected connections between states of rapture and modernity. Their exhibition I blew on Mr. Greenhill’s main joints with a very ‘hot’ breath runs from February 24–June 3.

The premiere of Florence Peake‘s RITE: on this pliant body we slip our WOW! begins as a performance by six dancers on a floor of wet clay (May 6). It unfolds as a summer-long exhibition, open until September 2: a layered interpretation of Stravinsky’s pivotal Modernist moment, The Rite of Spring, that celebrates the primal body as a force for change.

Right Here and Out There (June 23–September 16) is a solo exhibition by Alison Wilding, with works chosen in relation to the light that streams through the gallery’s windows, the sea, the heavy ships on the horizon, and the spaceship-like qualities of the building. The exhibition includes new outdoor elements.

Lucy Beech's new film follows the story of a woman in reproductive exile, her journey facilitated by a chain of human and non-human female bodies invisibly linked by the production of the sex hormones central to reproductive technologies. Co-commissioned with Tramway, Glasgow and Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette. September 15–December 2.

The Scientific Aspect of Surrealism (October 6, 2018–January 20, 2019) presents the works of Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff. Aligned with the English Surrealist movement, and active from 1935 until the early 1970s, Pailthorpe and Mednikoff combined a free, associative approach to painting with in-depth psychoanalysis, believing that this approach could—if practiced by enough people—lead to the complete liberation of humanity. Curated with Dr Hope Wolf, Lecturer in British Modernist Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies at Sussex University.

Our exhibitions are accompanied by a layered programme of Learning and Participation activities for all ages.

Finally, the De La Warr Pavilion is the lead partner in OUTLANDS, the new national (UK) touring experimental music network  that was launched in February 2018. Visit www.outlands.network for information.

If you would like to keep up to date with our programme, please visit www.dlwp.com to join our mailing list.