Exhibitions programme 2023

Spring
February 4–May 21

Angelo Madsen Minax: A Crisis of Human Contact
Multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax’s (b. 1983, Petoskey, US) practice spans documentary filmmaking, narrative cinema, essay film, installation, sound, music, performance, text and collective practices. Through these various mediums, Minax tells stories that are deeply personal. They draw upon friendships, romances, chosen family and family of origin, growing up in rural Michigan, and the nuanced embodiments of queerness and transness. They are also deeply radical—in their honesty, inquisitiveness, and ability to dwell in the at times painful and dark realities of kinship and selfhood—whilst also embedded with cathartic and spiritual expressions of sex, sexuality, love and desire.

Through film, photography, text and installation, A Crisis of Human Contact probes at the edges of what intimacy can and could look like. Taken from a voiceover in Minax’s film Bigger on the Inside (2022), the exhibition title highlights certain boundaries, limits, and (im)possibilities of interpersonal connection, which are explored through the different voices, characters and landscapes that the artist sets up. Through a collage-like approach to building his expansive visual language, Minax creates narratives that feel free, intuitive, mind-bending, playful, and highly moving. Visitors are invited to enter an environment that is at once quiet and noisy, intimate and heady—an idiosyncratic cosmology where landscape, love, sex, kinship and spirituality intersect.

Anna Maria Nabirye & Annie Saunders: Up in Arms
Removing the boundaries between process and outcome, artists Anna Maria Nabirye (b. London, UK) and Annie Saunders (b. San Francisco, US) bring together social practice, visual art and performance in their interdisciplinary project, Up in Arms, to create meaningful dialogue on the complexity of interracial friendships.

Up in Arms is an ongoing collaboration initiated by Nabirye and Saunders in 2016. As the starting point, the artists invite two participants—a Black woman and a friend of her choice—to re-embody and re-create Dan Wynn’s iconic 1971 portrait of Dorothy Pitman-Hughes and Gloria Steinem. The re-creation of this image acts as a ritual to open space for uncomfortable, challenging and transformative conversation around female friendship, feminism and anti-racism.

As part of their latest iteration of Up in Arms, commissioned by De La Warr Pavilion with additional support from Artsadmin, Nabirye and Saunders have invited women from across the local area—Bexhill, Hastings, and St. Leonards—to participate. The resulting documentation is incorporated into this expansive exhibition comprising photography, film and archival material—the most ambitious presentation of the project to date. Up in Arms is intended as a space for knowledge sharing with the potential to lead to new anti-racist dialogues and deeper intersectional collaborations and friendships.

Summer
June 10–September 3

Mohammed Sami: The Point 0
Mohammed Sami’s (b.1984, Baghdad, Iraq) first institutional solo show in the UK will continue his long-standing exploration of memory in relation to time and conflict.

Drawing on his own experiences living under Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad, and subsequently as a refugee in Sweden, his large-scale paintings exquisitely render abandoned interiors, claustrophobic cityscapes and uncanny depictions of apparently everyday objects including clothing, mattresses, chairs and tables. There is a haunting absence of people in these depictions of space and place, whose power lies as much in what cannot be seen or hovers just beyond the frame.

Presented in a site-specific installation in DLWP’s Ground floor gallery, the exhibition will include a series of major new paintings and will be accompanied by the first dedicated monograph on Sami, designed by Fraser Muggeridge with essays by Darian Leader and Amy Sherlock.

The Point 0 is organised by Camden Art Centre in collaboration with De La Warr Pavilion. The first iteration is currently on display at Camden Art Centre until May 27, 2023.

Katie Cuddon: Night Portraits
Katie Cuddon’s (b. 1979, London, UK) sculptures begin as pummelled and masticated clay which is fired and then combined with other materials and found objects. The sculptures are known for their tensile surfaces, shaped into forms that are simultaneously anthropomorphic, symbolic and surreal, and enter our space on supports, both found and constructed. Expressive and instinctive, the artist’s work explores psychological representations of the human body and the interpenetration of art and life.

Presenting a series of new works made by Cuddon since becoming a mother in 2018, the exhibition is conceived as an intimate and visceral environment in which unsettling imaginings play out. The title, Night Portraits refers to a group of small works within the exhibition inscribed with the artist’s teeth and incorporating candle wax exudes, whilst conjuring the dreamlike quality of the exhibition space. They are sculptures that resist a straightforward narrative reading, but rather take the viewer on a restless journey of association between our inner and outer worlds.

Night Portraits is Cuddon’s first institutional solo exhibition in over a decade and draws upon her recent research into the relationships between clay, writing, death, and the body pursued with fellowships and research grants from the Leverhulme Trust and Wellcome Trust.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.

Autumn
September 23, 2023–January 14, 2024

Hélio Oiticica
Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) is widely regarded as one of Brazil’s leading artists of the twentieth century and a touchstone for much contemporary art made since the 1960s, primarily through his freewheeling, participatory works of art, performative environments, avant-garde films and abstract paintings. Increasingly throughout this career, Oiticica became a countercultural figure within various underground artistic circles, foregrounding bodily interaction with spatial and environmental concerns over pure aesthetics. This landmark exhibition across both of DLWP’s galleries will be the first presentation of Oiticica’s work in a UK public institution in over 15 years.

In our current climate, we are faced with a series of impending crises: those of our bodies, our ecologies and the systems that govern them. Within this context, the relevance and radicality of Oiticica’s ideas could not be more evident. His visionary perspective opens new avenues for individuals to collectively reclaim subjectivity from its relentless exploitation through capitalism and consumerism. Drawing upon Oiticica’s notion of “crelazer” (creative leisure) as a guiding framework, as well as the ways in which queerness manifests through his expansive practice, this exhibition will explore the artist’s fusion of art and life through film, photography, sculpture, immersive environments, and archival material.