2019 Commissions Programme

Chisenhale Gallery commissions and produces contemporary art supporting international and UK-based artists to pursue new directions and make their most ambitious work to date. The gallery has an award winning, 36-year history as one of London’s most innovative forums for contemporary art and operates alternately as a production agency, exhibition hall, research centre and community resource. 

The Commissions Programme for 2019 comprises four exhibitions by Ghislaine Leung, Mandy El-Sayegh, Ima-Abasi Okon and Sidsel Meineche Hansen.

Working with painting, sculpture, sound and computer-generated animation these artists examine the influence of new technologies on the virtual, individual and social body. Through their work they contribute to new discourses on institutional critique, exploring themes relating to labour, abjection and desire—often producing self-contained systems and complete worlds. As part of the commissioning process a series of talks and events are programmed in collaboration with each artist and runs throughout the duration of each exhibition.

Ghislaine Leung
January 25-March 24 2019
Opening: Thursday, January 24, 2019, 6:30-8:30pm

CONSTITUTION is a new commission by artist and writer Ghislaine Leung. Leung’s work addresses formal and informal value structures and how these impact on individual and shared space. Working with sound, scale and temperature Leung’s new commission at Chisenhale Gallery addresses the ways in which we seek to assimilate and internalise conditions of high production, efficacy and visibility over maintenance, care and love.

Mandy El-Sayegh
April 12-June 9 2019
Opening: Thursday, April 11, 2019, 6:30-8:30pm

A major new commission and first solo exhibition in an institution by artist Mandy El-Sayegh. El-Sayegh’s prolific large-scale paintings and installations move between linguistic, material and corporeal registers, creating double meanings that signal a breakdown in, or disturbance of, everyday systems and orders. For her new commission El-Sayegh combines her distinctive painterly gestures with silk-screen print, latex, found objects and images. The resulting group of works trace a process whereby El-Sayegh examines an alternative formalism that originates with the body.

Ima-Abasi Okon
June 28-August 25 2019
Opening: Thursday, June 27, 2019, 6:30-8:30pm

A new commission and first solo exhibition in an institution by artist Ima-Abasi Okon. Okon works with sculpture, sound and video to produce installations that explore the historical and political charge of materials and the physical relationships between objects and bodies. Previous works have included the artist’s own jewellery, used as a filter between spaces, or contained within medical liquids. For her exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, Okon repurposes industrial and handmade objects, removing their use-value or function, in order to explore the formation of subjectivity, productivity and excess.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen
September 20-December 8 2019
Opening: Thursday, September 19, 2019, 6:30-8:30pm

A new commission by artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen. Meineche Hansen’s practice focuses on the industrial complex that connects virtual and robotic bodies to human labour within the pharmaceutical, pornographic and tech-industries. Combining her own low-tech craft with outsourced digital labour, Meineche Hansen’s work comprises drawing, woodcut print, sculpture, CGI animation and VR production. Previous works have considered the artist’s own working conditions and relationships, as well as exploring nervousness as a somatic and internalised form of institutional critique.

Chisenhale Gallery is a registered charity and part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio. All of the gallery’s exhibitions and the majority of events are free.

Chisenhale Gallery’s 2019 Commissions Programme is supported by the LUMA Foundation. 

Chisenhale Gallery’s 2019 Commissions Programme is also supported by Shane Akeroyd; Joe & Marie Donnelly; the Chisenhale Gallery Commissions Fund and Chisenhale Gallery Friends and Patrons. Programme production partners include EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute through their artist in residence programme.

Chisenhale Gallery’s current exhibition, Earwitness Theatre, by artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan continues until December 9, 2018.

For further information please contact:
Julia Schouten at SUTTON: T +44 (0) 20 7183 3577 or julias [​at​] suttonpr.com
Ellen Greig: T +44 (0) 20 3328 1964 or ellen.greig [​at​] chisenhale.org.uk.