Whitechapel Gallery announces an entirely free season of digital events and podcasts exploring such timely topics as health, revolutionary feminism, diasporic experience and virtual curation.
Film & Performance
Jarman Award 2020 Weekend
Saturday 14 – Sunday 15 November
Bringing together the six artists shortlisted for the 2020 Film London Jarman Award – Michelle Williams Gamaker (b. 1979, UK), Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings (both b. 1991, UK), Jenn Nkiru (b. UK), Project Art Works (established 1996), Larissa Sansour (b. 1973, Jerusalem) and Andrea Luka Zimmerman (b. 1969, Germany) – this weekend screens each nominated film alongside a special live online programme of talks and performances. In partnership with Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network.
London Contemporary Music Festival: Text Scores
Thursday 10 December, 5pm
Marking the week that the London Contemporary Music Festival would have taken place, this event brings together performances, readings and discussions with artists and musicians that draw on a new series of text scores commissioned by the festival.
Talks
Big Ideas: Maria Hlavajova
Thursday 8 October, 5pm
How can contemporary art and culture respond to and engage with the urgent political questions facing us today? The Artistic Director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht, Maria Hlavajova, holds a lecture exploring her work to date, which includes a focus on society, the concept of care and ‘instituting otherwise’.
Networked Curating
Thursday 29 October, 5pm
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a turning point in the history of the internet and curatorial practice. As galleries and arts institutions look anew at networked technologies, this discussion in partnership with London South Bank University invites professionals to consider the future of more experimental and networked modes of practice.
Health
Thursday 12 November, 5pm
Celebrating the latest in the Documents of Contemporary Art series of critical anthologies edited by Barbara Rodriguez Munoz, this online programme invites artist Khairani Barokka (b. 1985, Indonesia) and others to consider how health intersects with sexuality, ethnicity, gender, class and coloniality.
Revolutionary Feminisms
Thursday 26 November, 5pm
Looking at how black, anti-racist and anti-capitalist feminism is side-lined in mainstream discourses, authors Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah are joined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Vron Ware to discuss what feminist resistance looks like, from anti-colonialism to prison abolition. In partnership with Verso as part of the event series Feminist Resistance: Strategies for the 21st Century.
Community Events
For over a decade Whitechapel Gallery has championed community-focused events, workshops and educational activities, making it one of the longest standing initiatives in arts institutions globally. This autumn a series of online reading groups titled Postcards from the Diaspora will be hosted collaboratively with NUMBI, a Somali-originated African-centred arts and heritage organisation. People of all genders, sexualities, religions and ethnicity are welcome.
Postcards from the Diaspora: Watering the Imagination
Thursday 1 October, 6.30pm
Led by Afi Hussen, Asma Kabadeh and Rakiya Abdulahi, this group session is based around Diriye Osman’s Fairytales for Lost Children (2013), a collection of short stories about the queer Somali experience. Participants are invited to read a section of the text and reflect on what it means to use history as a tool for forging new futures.
Postcards from the Diaspora: The silent minority within the minority
Thursday 5 November, 6.30pm
Facilitated by Hoda Hashi and using Audre Lorde’s The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977), this interactive workshop explores the questions posed by Lorde from the perspective of voices within her community that have traditionally been silenced.
Postcards from the Diaspora: The Search for Love
Thursday 2 December, 6.30pm
This session, led by Hodan Omar, explores segments of Communion: The Female Search for Love by bell hooks, a text that speaks to concurrent issues concerning the search for love today in a late capitalist system.
Whitechapel Gallery podcast series: Hear, Now
To be released over the course of the autumn season, a new podcast series Hear, Now joins Whitechapel Gallery curators in dialogue with artists, collaborators and thinkers about ongoing exhibitions and the stories behind them. They reveal methods and ideas, offering fascinating insights and perspectives on the work in the galleries and the cultural issues of our time.
Episode One: Accelerate your escape
Renowned British painter Gary Hume speaks with curator Laura Smith about his selection of art from the Hiscox Collection. Immersed in the transformative power of colour and form, Hume invites us to escape the everyday and to find new joys and sorrows in the myriad worlds imagined by his selected artists including Keith Coventry, Nan Goldin, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Yves Oppenheim, Thomas Ruff and Alison Wilding.
Episode Two: Home: Live > In Room
What role might art play when our freedom is curtailed? Can confinement trigger new creative processes and networks of solidarity? Hear Whitechapel Gallery’s Youth Forum, Duchamp & Sons alongside Curator of Youth Programmes Renee Odjidja discuss their process in curating an exhibition virtually. They consider the ways in which lockdown has affected experiences of art and culture and how the home – as refuge or prison, as still life or real life – has inspired generations of artists.
Episode Three: Kai Althoff Goes with Bernard Leach
Artist, ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal joins for a special conversation with former Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick to coincide with the exhibition Kai Althoff Goes with Bernard Leach. Known for his artistic practice alongside his globally acclaimed memoir, The Hare with the Amber Eyes, de Waal is an expert on the work of Bernard Leach and shares reflections on his enduring appeal to contemporary artists.
Episode Four: Exercising Freedom: Encounters with Art, Artists and Communities
In the late 1970s in London’s East End, Whitechapel Art Gallery developed a pioneering approach to art and education. Jenni Lomax, Community and Education Organiser at the time, invited artists to work alongside communities to set up residencies in schools, workshops at the Gallery and local partnerships with key organisations. Lomax joins curators Sofia Victorino and Nayia Yiakoumaki to return to this paradigmatic moment in the story of art, education, discussing what can be learnt from artists and audiences.
Episode Five: Can You Hear Me?
In her new video installation Indian artist Nalini Malani explores global issues of social injustice, positioning the voiceless and the invisible alongside gods and goddesses, intellectuals and poets. Here Malani is in conversation with Curator Emily Butler to interrogate the myriad stories and political truths in her nine channel animation and how she translates her artist’s notebooks into moving image.
Episode Six: Something Necessary and Useful
Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga creates monumental structures out of everyday materials to propose architecture as transitory and corporeal. Having destroyed the gigantic painted cardboard environment he had created for Whitechapel Gallery, Bunga discusses structure as memory, the movement of the body in painting and the Shaker’s idea of making as a form of payer, with curator Emily Butler.
Notes to editors
About Whitechapel Gallery
For over a century the Whitechapel Gallery has premiered world-class artists from modern masters such as Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Frida Kahlo and Hannah Höch to contemporaries such as Zarina Bhimji, Sophie Calle, William Kentridge, Eduardo Paolozzi and Michael Rakowitz. Its historic campus houses exhibitions, artist commissions, collection displays, historic archives, education resources, inspiring art courses, talks and film screenings, the Townsend dining room and the Koenig Bookshop. It is a touchstone for contemporary art internationally, plays a central role in London’s cultural landscape and is pivotal to the continued growth of the world’s most vibrant contemporary art quarter.
Visitor Information
Admission: Free
Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 6pm; Thursdays, 11am – 9pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77 – 82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX
Nearest London Underground Stations: Aldgate East, Liverpool Street, Tower Gateway DLR
T + 44 (0) 20 7522 7888 | E info@whitechapelgallery.org | W whitechapelgallery.org
Press Contact
For more information, interviews and images, contact:
Carrie Rees at Rees & Co | carrie@reesandco.com
Megan Miller | meganmiller@whitechapelgallery.org |press@whitechapelgallery.org
Colette Downing
Communications Manager
E colettedowning@whitechapelgallery.org
T +44 (0)207 539 3315
For all other communications enquiries please contact:
E press@whitechapelgallery.org
T +44 (0)20 7522 7888
