2024 Commissions Programme

Chisenhale Gallery was founded by artists. The same experimental vision and spirit of possibility that changed an empty veneer factory and brewery warehouse into an art gallery guides our work today. We commission new works of art, supporting artists at every stage of project development, from concept to completion. The gallery has an award winning, 40-year history as one of London’s most innovative spaces for contemporary art. As we build on this rich and varied legacy, we continue to place artists at the centre of everything we do.

Chisenhale Gallery’s Commissions Programme for 2024 comprises four new exhibitions by artists Joshua Leon, Rory Pilgrim, Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Bruno Zhu. Invitations to witness, gather, and gossip run through the programme, with material and temporal interrogations, built environments, and unscripted chance encounters pushing the boundaries of exhibition making. As part of the commissioning process, a programme of talks and events is developed with each artist to extrapolate and amplify ideas underpinning their new work. In 2024, as part of Chisenhale Gallery’s Publishing Programme, we will also release three new publications by Joshua Leon, Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Bruno Zhu.

Joshua Leon
February 23–April 21, 2024  

Joshua Leon is a poet, writer, and visual artist. Taking lamentation as a space of critical engagement, his text-led processes produce exhibitions and performances that bind memoir with historical research. For his Chisenhale Gallery commission, and most expansive site-sensitive installation to date, Leon will explore the misnomers, erasures, and disquiet held in the building’s history, binding them with those of his own family. Spanning sculpture and sound, Leon’s new installation will trace a collapsing of memories and histories to offer a nuanced exploration of Jewish identity, where absence and ellipses transition from socially imposed to politically intentional. Leon’s first publication will be developed alongside the commission.

Rory Pilgrim
May 17–July 21, 2024

Working across music, film, text, drawing and performance, Rory Pilgrim redefines how we come together and strive for social change. Influenced by activist, feminist and social practices, Pilgrim works with others, through long-term dialogue and collaboration, to share and voice personal experiences. Pilgrim’s Chisenhale Gallery commission will rethink the emotional and ecological impact of law. Following long-term engagement with communities based on The Isle of Portland – a small island in the English Channel, home to two architecturally dominating prisons, and a diminishing natural ecosystem – Pilgrim’s commission will unfold with others through screenplay, live performance and music. Against a backdrop of incarceration and environmental trauma, Pilgrim’s ambitious new body of work asks; how can we reframe justice as a form of spiritual sanctuary?

Simnikiwe Buhlungu
September 6–November 3, 2024

What do knowledges look like? Who produces them? And how are they distributed? Through sound, film, and text, as well as radio shows and publishing, Simnikiwe Buhlungu asks; how are knowledges encountered? Previous works have included theremins, cassette tapes and research with honey bees, to navigate the boundless potential answers that unfold and reshape as we – and our non-human counterparts – move through the world. Chisenhale Gallery will present a major new commission and first solo exhibition in the UK by Buhlungu. Traversing disciplines from microbiology to genealogy, and locations from London to Johannesburg, Buhlungu’s commission takes the ‘puddle’ as both model and methodology to uncover the ways knowledges, histories and ecologies circulate and pool. A new publication, continuing Buhlungu’s interest in forms of distribution, will be developed as part of the commissioning process.

Bruno Zhu
November 22, 2024–February 2, 2025

Mechanisms of desire, identity, and ideology inform the work of Bruno Zhu. Influenced by fashion design, publishing and scenography, Zhu works in the space of fiction to rewrite agency, authorship, consumption and power. His object-led installations implicate the audience as cultural agents with the power to produce their own meanings. Comprising a series of purpose-built rooms, Zhu’s Chisenhale Gallery commission and first solo exhibition in the UK, spatialises different states of thinking, being and feeling. Through the lens of public and private, the commission negotiates ornamentation and abstraction, inflation and deflation, with Zhu proposing a new model of display. A reader, co-edited by Zhu, will be developed alongside his commission.

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

The 2024 Commissions Programme is produced with support from the Chisenhale Gallery Commissions Fund.

Chisenhale Gallery’s current exhibition by Benoît Piéron, Slumber Party, is on view until November 12, 2023.

For further information please contact: T +44 (0)20 8981 4518 / media@chisenhale.org.uk