Archipelago: Visions in Orbit

MA Curating Art and Public Programmes

15 August 2024 – 5 January 2025

The archipelago is diffracted, fractal, necessary in its totality, fragile or contingent in its unity, passing through and remaining, it is a state of the world. — Édouard Glissant

Archipelago: Visions in Orbit is an original exhibition curated by students from the MA Curating Art and Public Programmes course – a unique one-year professional placement qualification, organised in collaboration with London South Bank University (LSBU).

Bringing together a diverse range of artists, perspectives and mediums, the exhibition takes the physiology of an archipelago – a cluster of distinct but connected islands – as a metaphor to frame and relate seemingly disparate artistic positions.

With society becoming increasingly fragmented, exacerbated by heightened global geo-political tensions, the exhibition proposes an ‘archipelagic’ approach, aimed at illuminating a shared cultural fabric, while at the same time allowing for complex differences.

Through the enigmatic and ethereal works of Esther Teichmann (b. 1980, Germany) and Jakob Rowlinson (b. 1990, UK); portrayals of emergence and reflection in the paintings of Jade de Montserrat’s (b. 1981, UK) and sculptural reliefs of Cameron Ugbodu’s (b. 2000, Austria), alongside considerations of diasporic histories in the performance documentations of Daniella Valz Gen (b. Unlisted, Peru) and Güler Ateş   (b. 1977, Turkey), the exhibition presents a constellation of contemporary myth-makers, dreamers and artistic documentarians. Through their collective and individual narrative imaginings, the artists explore themes of migration, belonging and connection.

Archipelago: Visions in Orbit speaks to, and of, the Gallery’s historic location in Whitechapel, East London, a place that has and continues to see the coming together of migrant communities in a time of political polarisation.

Artworks presented within the exhibition include sculpture, photography and painting, performance documentation and textiles works.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme including performances and discursive events with artists and curators.  For more information, visit whitechapelgallery.org/events. 

 About the Artists  

Cameron Ugbodu (b. 2000, Austria)

Cameron Ugbodu, aka “See You”, is an autodidact Nigerian and Austrian multidisciplinary artist living and working in London. Through their work, Cameron investigates family histories, identity and queerness. Influences and techniques learned from their family’s heritage from Benin City (Edo State, Nigeria) and the Wachau area (Austria) shape Cameron’s practice. Craftsmanship has always been an important part of Cameron’s family, this coupled with difficulty expressing themselves verbally has led Cameron to explore visual expression through different mediums in order to communicate their world to others. On a constant search for oneself, their work archives different stages of their experience and the space surrounding them with a gaze towards the future and exploration. 

Daniella Valz Gen (b. Unlisted, Peru)

Process-led, Daniella Valz Gen’s work explores poetic experience through different forms of reading, writing, performing and making. They’re invested in a relational and responsive approach to land, place, and the other-than-human. Born in Peru and based in London, Valz Gen’s work highlights the interstices between languages, cultures and value systems as areas where potential new meanings can arise.

Valz Gen’s work has been shown at Glasgow International, SPILL Festival, Aichi Triennale, Gropius Bau among others. Subversive Economies, their first poetry collection, was published by PSS Press in 2018. Their writing has been featured in The Happy Hypocrite, Map Magazine, Salt, and others. Valz Gen is Whitechapel Gallery’s Writer in Residence for 2024.

Esther Teichmann (b. 1980, Germany)

Esther Teichmann’s practice moves across still and moving image, textiles and painting, creating alternate worlds, which blur autobiography and fiction. Central to the work lies an exploration of the origins of fantasy and desire and how these are bound to experiences of loss and representation. Our relationship to the maternal, home and female pleasure are themes which are returned to through a layering of voices and visual approaches.  Within these works of speculative fiction, bodies are indivisible from landscape –  caves as mothers, water as mothers, beds as lovers, mouths as homes, seashells as orifices, sisters at every turn.  The work is haunted by night dreams and daydreams, of drowning and sleeping. Thinking about our bodies as sites of knowledge production, Teichmann reimagines space and encounters through feminist subjectivity, exploring the relationship between fiction, myth and lived experience.

Solo museum shows include Heavy the Sea, Transformer Station, Cleveland Museum of Art, USA and Mondschwimmen, Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Mannheim, Germany. Collaborations include Phantasie Fotostudio with Monster Chetwynd at John Hansard Gallery, the co-curation and editing of the exhibition and book, Staging Disorder, with artist Christopher Stewart with whom she also created the Wellcome Trust funded film and research project, Constellations. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Esther is represented by Flowers Gallery. Teichmann received an MA and PhD from the Royal College of Art (RCA) and is Head of Programme of the Master of Research at the RCA.

Güler Ateş  (b. 1977, Turkey)

Güler moved from Turkey to London in ​1998, studying first at Lewisham College ​and then moving on to a BA in Painting at ​Wimbledon School of Art. She ​subsequently graduated with an MA in Fine ​Art from the Royal College of Art in 2008. ​Her work has been exhibited widely in the ​UK and internationally including solo ​exhibitions in Washington DC, Mumbai, ​Turin, Amsterdam, Napoli, Porto, Okinawa ​and London. Güler has been awarded ​numerous prizes for her work including the ​Arts Council England Project Award in ​2020. Her work is also held in notable ​collections including the Royal Collection, ​Turin, Italy, the Victoria and Albert ​Museum, London, Royal Academy of Arts, ​and the Government Arts Collection, UK.

Jade de Montserrat (b. 1981, UK)

Dr. Jade de Montserrat was the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship supporting her PhD and the development of her work from her Black Diasporic perspective in the North of England. de Montserrat works through performance, drawing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, print and text. In 2020, Iniva and Manchester Art Gallery commissioned her as the first artist for the Future Collect project, with a solo exhibition Constellations: Care and Resistance at Manchester Art Gallery (2020 – 2022). In 2021, she participated in a group exhibition An Infinity of Traces at Lisson Gallery, and opened a solo exhibition In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens at Bosse & Baum Gallery, London. In 2022, she was included in the group exhibition Body Vessel Clay,  at Two Temple Place, London, and York Art Gallery (2022), and A Tall Order! – Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s, at Touchstones, Rochdale (2023). Most recently she had a solo exhibition titled Soul of Fire, Old Parcels Office Artspace, Scarborough (2023). In 2023 the artist co-launched Soul of Fire Artists’ Charcoal to make the material accessible to schools and communities. In 2024, de Montserrat launched Cracks in the Curriculum 5 with Serpentine Education, she participated in a solo exhibition In Defence of Our Lives at Bosse & Baum Gallery, London and a group exhibition Towards New Worlds at MIMA, Middlesbrough. In Autumn 2024, the artist will particpate in a group exhibition titled Conversations at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Jade de Montserrat is a Tutor at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.

Jakob Rowlinson (b. 1990, UK)

Jakob Rowlinson lives and works ​in London. He studied BA Fine Art at The ​Ruskin School of Art (Oxford University), ​and MA Sculpture at the Royal College of ​Art (London). He works across leather ​masks, embroidery, and jacquard ​tapestries to weave alternative histories ​steeped in queer culture, mythology, and ​nature. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Thirteen ​Fools’ at Huxley Parlor gallery, London UK ​(2024), and ‘Faerie Land’ at the Dowse ​museum in Wellington, New Zealand ​(2023). His work has also been featured in ​group exhibitions at Steve Turner Gallery, ​Los Angeles (2023), and Guts gallery, ​London (2023).

Notes to Editors

 The exhibition is curated by Gözde Altun, Eve Barnes, Molly Clark, Maria Green, Parastoo Jafari, Hannah Lewis, Alessandro Morter, Kuba Ocean, Yasmin Riley, Angela Sanchez-Castrillon, Benjamin Sebastian, Ajahee Sekkm-Miles, Cosima Straub and Hannah Walker.

Listing Information

Visitor Information

General Gallery Admission: Free
Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 6pm; Thursdays, 11am – 9pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77 – 82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX
T + 44 (0) 20 7522 7888 | E info@whitechapelgallery.org | W whitechapelgallery.org

 Press Information

For more information, interviews and images, contact:

Will Ferreira Dyke, Whitechapel Gallery | WillFerreiraDyke@whitechapelgallery.org

About Whitechapel Gallery

Whitechapel Gallery was founded in 1901 with the aim to bring great art to the people of East London.   From the outset, the Gallery has pushed forward a bold programme of exhibitions and educational activities, driven by the desire to enrich the cultural offer for local communities and provide new opportunities for extraordinary artists from across the globe, to showcase their works to UK audiences, often for the first time.

From ground-breaking solo shows from artists as diverse as Barbara Hepworth (1954), Jackson Pollock (1958), Helio Oiticica (1969), Gilbert & George (1971), Eva Hesse (1979), Frida Kahlo (1982), Sonia Boyce (1988), Sophie Calle (2010), Zarina Bhimji (2012), Emily Jacir (2015), William Kentridge (2016), Theaster Gates (2021) and Nicole Eisenman (2023) to thought-provoking exhibitions that reflect key artistic and cultural concerns, the Gallery’s focus on bringing artists, ideas, and audiences together, remains as important today as it did over a century ago and has helped to cement the East End, as one of the world’s most exciting and diverse cultural quarters.

We are proud to be a Gallery that is locally embedded and globally connected. Its vision, under the new Directorship of Gilane Tawadros, is to ensure Whitechapel Gallery claims a distinctive and radical position in the social and cultural landscape, building on its pioneering history as a place for invigorated and inclusive engagement with contemporary art.

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