Very happy to have been invited to join these great speakers at this conference exploring the curation of public space. Artists, Academics and curators will speak alongside property developers and place-makers on
design and place-making decisions.
Perhaps see you there on 15th November! - ticket info and link below!
Ticket £55 / Student and young artists £15
/conference
Confirmed list of speakers:
Lisa Anderson Director of Black Cultural Archives
Louisa Buck British art critic and contemporary art correspondent for The Art Newspaper
Kirsten Dunne Senior Manager, Cultural Infrastructure & Public Realm at the Mayor of London’s
Office Prof Jason Gaiger Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of Oxford
Anya Gallaccio British artist shortlisted for the Turner Prize
Thomas Heatherwick CBE Designer and founder of multi-award winning Heatherwick Studio
Stella Ioannou Artistic Director of City of London’s Sculpture in the City programme & director of
cultural studio Lacuna
George Kekatos Senior Cultural Strategist at cultural place-making agency Future City
Hew Locke OBE RA British sculptor and contemporary visual artist
Dr Dawn Pereira Post-War art & design historian
Giles Smith Founding partner of Assemble, multidisciplinary collective working across architecture,
design & art and winners of the Turner Prize
Godfrey Worsdale Director of the Henry Moore Foundation
You can vote now for your choice of the 6 shortlisted pieces for Memorial for the victims of the transatlantic slave trade...here's the link....
As well as the past, this memorial also needs to be about the present and the future – and children signify the future. I want to engender a sense of pride in our survival....It’s been estimated that up to a quarter of all enslaved people transported across the Atlantic were children....just as saints in history were depicted carrying the cathedrals they built, so our children will be carrying the buildings the fruits of their labour made possible.... just go to www.london.gov.ul and search for 'memorial'...
“Hurricane Season” features 58 works in a range of media by six artists from across the Caribbean archipelago and its diaspora: including my 'Jumbie House 2'
These artists demonstrate the crucial role arts can play in this unfolding crisis by translating data sets and dire predictions into relatable terms, reframing the conversation around how changes in the climate relate to everyday lived experiences as well as to notions of community, family, and home. Through art, they succeed in converting a global crisis into human scale, acknowledging the grim realities of the climate crisis by emphasizing its toll on people and yet, also the possibilities of a better future. It is an exhibition about homes under threat as well as cycles of environmental violence and repair.
Check out the exhibition through September 22, 2024 at Des Moines Art Center. #ppowgallery
Now on view at @desmoinesartcenter , “Hurricane Season: Caribbean Art + Climate Change” is a group exhibition featuring some of my works, including this - 'Survivor'
Hurricanes and the devastation they bring have long been a part of life in the Caribbean, but with climate change, these storms are getting far more violent. They pick up steam faster than ever before, leaving little time to prepare. The aftermaths of storms are unbearable and shed light on the living legacy of colonialism and ongoing political corruption. Yet even as the effects of climate change wreak havoc on the region, life across the archipelago continues. People adapt. They weather the storm, even as they are weathered by it.
My works 'Gilt' - shown before on the front of the Metropolitan Museum in Nw York have made it across the sea to Europe - now on show in Antwerp. This group exhibition is "Come Closer" at Middelheim Museum -
' What do the artists share in this artistic project? They all make room for new relations between artist, artwork and audience...Spectators help to create the artwork...The manner in which objects in museums are categorised, preserved, and presented is evolving. As well is the role of the spectator who is not solely involved at the end of the artistic process...'
Thanks to-The Middelheim Museum for the photos...
Six leading artists have been shortlisted to create a memorial to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade in London’s Docklands.
Backed by £500,000 of funding by mayor Sadiq Khan last year, the memorial will be located at West India Quay. Its intention will be to recognise and reflect on the role London played in slavery....artists are Alberta Whittle, Grada Kilomba, Helen Cammock, Hew Locke, Khaleb Brooks, Zak Ové.
Thanks to the English students in Naples who sent me this charming film, inspired by my piece 'The Jurors' . This sort of thing is incredibly flattering and humbling! Link: /watch?v=W4OC9kzGqrg
Thanks to Murray Whyte at the Boston globe for his review of The Procession currently on in Boston at the ICA Waterhouse...
"Tangled up in all of it are the people who neither
benefit from nor are immune to the relentless
assault of global commerce... start at the back and work your way forward and you’ll feel its churn. Mass movements of people over generations and centuries have been both willing and not. “The Procession” is explosively jubilant in color, material, and form; but Locke’s counterweight of history thrusts its carnival and pageantry into deeper readings about dispossession and displacement....Locke didn’t make the piece for the Watershed, or with Boston even remotely in mind. It was purpose- built for a grand neoclassical hall at the Tate... Just the fact that “The Procession” is so at home here — or almost anywhere — tells you something, and nothing good. Locke’s many micronarratives add up to an imposing global epic — unsteady and still unfolding — with no end in sight."
: Installation view, Hew Locke: The Procession, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2024. Photo by Mel Taing.
To celebrate Gasworks’ 30th anniversary, I created a special limited edition print 'Pomeroon'. Available to view and purchase through the Gasworks website or contact shop@gasworks.org.uk. This print references a long-standing territorial dispute between Guyana and Venezuela. The title takes its name from the Pomeroon river in the Essequibo region of Guyana, marking a territorial border, originally demarcated during colonial times and called, after a celebrated explorer, The Schomburgk Line. Earlier this year the Venezuelan government passed a controversial law designating Essequibo as their new state, despite the current border being internationally recognised for over a century.
The figure depicted in the work is a ‘memento mori’, or ‘reminder of death’. Its medieval outfit is blended with African, Indo-Caribbean and pre-Columbian designs. For Locke, who is interested in inventions of identity, this merging of different motifs adds up to a Guyanese design.
The golden background of the print also references a foundational myth of Guyana: that of El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. Today the search is not gold but for oil, or ‘black gold’: a search which is transforming the country profoundly, and which underlies Venezuela’s increasingly aggressive stance on the Essequibo border dispute.
Pomeroon, 2024
Polymer Gravure on Hahnemuhler Off White 300g
22.5 x 36 cm, unframed £750
Edition of 30
You are welcome to the opening for “Narrative Obsession in the Post-Colonial Psyche” is on Thursday, May 16 from 6-8pm at The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street, New York.
The exhibition aims to ask: can there really be such a state as "post-colonial," when the systems of manipulation in poorer nations still give way to pricing and access determined by former colonists?
They are showing several of my works - including this one, "Pilgrim, Central Park", 2018
C-type photograph with mixed media, 72 x 48 in.
