Exhibition programme 2027

Chisenhale Gallery commissions and produces contemporary art. We are an artist-centred organisation, dedicated to championing risk, experimentation, and critical thinking through the creation of groundbreaking work by today’s most significant early-career artists. 

Operating as a production agency and exhibition space, we support international and UK-based artists to pursue new directions and make their most ambitious work to date. Exhibiting four major new commissions, our 2027 programme foregrounds radically experimental exhibition-making and critically engaged, artist-driven practice.

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino
January 16–March 14, 2027

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino is a conceptual artist living and working in Berlin whose works negotiate and reorganise relations of authorship, ownership and institutional agency. For their first solo exhibition in a UK institution, Celestino revisits their personal family archive to investigate new labour configurations and modes of producing knowledge, extending that research into a series of contractual propositions that reconfigure Chisenhale’s institutional functions and organisation, from the architecture to the terms of employment, and the format of the commission itself. In the gallery, these propositions take material form through sound, document and architecture, tracing a line from personal inheritance to institutional structure.

Diane Severin Nguyen
April 9–June 13, 2027

Diane Severin Nguyen is an artist living and working in New York. Her practice often explores how images shape identity and power, and the fantasies of nationhood and victimhood that underpin war and propaganda. For her first solo exhibition in the UK, Nguyen presents Powerless, a video installation filmed in the Bavarian Alps. Seen primarily through surveillance, drone, and body-worn cameras, a child leaves home against her mother’s wishes and moves through an idyllic landscape as a helicopter circles above. Carrying an American folk band whose wistful songs romanticise rescue, the helicopter offers at once an escape and a recruitment. Familial longing and military vision converge, blurring care and control.

Coumba Samba
July 9–September 5, 2027

Coumba Samba is an artist living and working between London and New York. Samba’s work traces how power circulates through modernist abstraction and minimalism, drawing on everyday forms from the global built environment as evidence of the economic and political infrastructures that produce them. For her Chisenhale Gallery exhibition, Samba will produce a new large-scale sculptural installation that extends her forensic approach to colour. The installation will carry a bespoke powder-coat finish derived through digital spectrometry, continuing her investigation into labour, the movement of materials between regions, and how institutional structures come to shape individual and collective identity.

Deborah-Joyce Holman
October 1–December 5, 2027

Deborah-Joyce Holman is a London-based artist working in painting and moving image. Holman's practice is informed by strategies of refusal: a term that describes the deliberate use of opacity and illegibility as counter-hegemonic positions that resist dominant systems of representation. For their first solo exhibition in a UK institution, Holman will develop a new video installation. The work extends their ongoing thinking into the psychic labour demanded of Black subjects by structures of recognition, drawing on Black poetics and theories of opacity to explore what it might mean to withhold, rather than perform, legibility.

The 2027 Exhibition Programme partners include Asymmetry; Kunstverein Braunschweig. Produced with support from the Chisenhale Gallery Commissions Circle; The Ampersand Foundation; and Pro Helvetia.

The film installation Powerless by Diane Severin Nguyen is co-commissioned by Haus der Kunst München; Hessel Museum of Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York; The Vega Foundation, Toronto; the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, Munich; LUMA Foundation; and Chisenhale Gallery, London. The film is produced by if… Productions Film GmbH.

The 2027 Talks and Events Programme is made possible with Headline Support from Cockayne.

Chisenhale Gallery’s current exhibition Kibuuka Omumbaale by Wakaliga Uganda is on view until 6 December 2026.  

For further information, please contact Sutton PR: chisenhale@suttoncomms.com 

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