Spring 2025
Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker
12 February – 4 May 2025
Ticketed
Whitechapel Gallery presents a major survey exhibition of late British multi-media artist Donald Rodney (b. 1961, West Bromwich; d. 1998, London). Aimed at showcasing the breadth and influence of his work and introducing a new generation of audiences to this important artist, Visceral Canker cements Rodney as a vital figure in British art.
Rodney’s wide-ranging practice resists simple categorisation both thematically, and through his innovative approach to materials and technical processes. He worked across sculpture, installation, drawing, painting and digital media, experimenting with new materials and technologies throughout his career. Rodney suffered from sickle cell anaemia and harnessed the condition to confront the prejudices and injustices surrounding racial identity, Black masculinity, chronic illness and Britain’s colonial past. At his untimely death in 1998 from complications arising from sickle cell, Rodney left a multifaceted and influential body of work which has influenced younger generations of artists, writers and film-makers on both sides of the Atlantic.
As part of the Whitechapel’s commitment to introduce audiences to the work of important but underrepresented British and international artists through ambitious exhibitions, Visceral Canker brings together the majority of Rodney’s surviving works from 1982 to 1997. These include large-scale oil pastels on X-rays, kinetic and animatronic sculptures as well as sketchbooks and rare archival materials.
Born to Jamaican parents, Rodney grew up in Smethwick, West Midlands. His family lived on Marshall Street, which became a centre for racial tensions in the 1960s. He studied Art at Bournville, Nottingham and London throughout the 1980s, and first gained visibility as a founding member of the pioneering BLK Art Group: an association of young Black artists, critics and curators formed in Wolverhampton to foreground issues of racism and racial identity through a variety of artistic languages.
The title of the exhibition comes from a 1990 work which comprises two wooden plaques displaying heraldic images, linked together by a system of medical tubes that pump theatrical blood. It exemplifies both the visceral aspect of Rodney’s work and politics, and his persistent scrutiny of the canker, or disease, at the heart of society: in this case specifically, how the inhumanity of Britain’s colonial history continues to structure life today.
The exhibition will include the seminal work The House that Jack Built (1987), a mixed media installation featuring a crudely fashioned figure seated in front of a house made of X-rays onto which Rodney added text and drawings. From the late 1980s, Rodney made extensive use of medical X-rays in his work, exploring the creative and metaphoric possibilities of the medium.
The presentation will display one of his earliest surviving paintings, How the West was Won (1982) which was made while Rodney was an undergraduate student at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University). This is where Rodney first met British artist Keith Piper, who became a close friend, and who steered him towards a more politically robust art practice, which explored issues of Blackness.
Also on display is the 35mm slide installation, Cataract (1991) which is the first time it has been reconstructed for public viewing. The work comprises three unsynchronised slide projections that produce overlapping images of the fragmented parts of four different Black male faces, including Rodney’s own.
Towards the end of his life, Rodney’s practice increasingly broke new ground and works like Autoicon (1997–2000), an interactive digital artwork initiated by Rodney and finalised by a group of his close friends after he died known as ‘Donald Rodney plc’ anticipated machine learning technologies. Referencing Jeremy Bentham’s infamous nineteenth-century Auto-Icon, the work simulates both the physical presence and elements of the creative personality of Rodney. Consisting of a Java-based AI and neural network, the platform engages the user in text-based ‘chat’ and provides responses by drawing from a dense body of data related to Rodney, including documentation of artworks, medical records, interviews, images, notes and videos.
The exhibition is curated by Gasworks Director Robert Leckie and Spike Island Director Nicole Yip, and organised at Whitechapel Gallery by Gilane Tawadros and Cameron Foote.
Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker is presented in partnership with Spike Island and Nottingham Contemporary. The exhibition is currently on view at Nottingham Contemporary until 5 January, 2025.
This exhibition is part of the West of England Visual Arts Alliance programme and is generously supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund, the Henry Moore Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Pilgrim Trust.
Summer 2025
Hamad Butt: Apprehensions
4 June – 7 September 2025
Ticketed
This timely exhibition is the first major survey of Hamad Butt (b. 1962, Lahore; d. 1994, London). Butt was a pioneering artist whose ground-breaking sculptural installations marked him out as a leading artist of his generation. Butt’s work ranges across seemingly disparate themes of desire, death and racial difference, which he brought together in elegant and compelling installations, as well as videos, paintings, and works on paper.
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and raised in London, Butt was British South Asian, Muslim by upbringing, and queer. Before his AIDS-related death aged 32, Butt completed and showed four major sculptural installations: Transmission (1990) and the three-part installation Familiars (1992), which staged new encounters between art and science in the time of the AIDS crisis. He also left behind videos, writings, drawings and paintings, which will be exhibited together for the first time.
A contemporary of the Young British Artists, and their peer at Goldsmiths, critics described Butt as epitomising the new ‘hazardism’ in art of the 1990s. His works imply physical risk or endangerment. In Transmission, the threatening image of a triffid (a harbinger of blindness and mass extinction) is safe to look at only after visitors don protective glasses to screen out the harmful ultraviolet light. In Familiars, we encounter chemicals that can heal us but also that irritate, blind or kill if unleashed. Butt’s work summons the fear of injury and contamination as analogies for disease and contagion (including HIV/AIDS), mortality and climate emergency.
The title of the exhibition, ‘Apprehensions’ is taken from Butt’s essay of the same name which was first published in the ‘posthumous artist’s book’ Familiars, edited by Stephen Foster and co-published by Iniva and John Hansard Gallery. For Butt, the word ‘apprehensions’ carries several meanings simultaneously, including being gripped with fear, the scene of capture, and grasping or groping for understanding, suggesting a series of suspended moments that, like Butt’s structures, project us into a space of fear and precarity.
Hamad Butt: Apprehensions is curated by Dominic Johnson, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Queen Mary University of London, and co-curated with Seán Kissane and Gilane Tawadros. The exhibition has been organised by IMMA, Dublin in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery and in cooperation with Jamal Butt.
Hamad Butt: Apprehensions has been generously supported by Cockayne – Grants for the Arts: a donor advised fund held at The London Community Foundation. Research for this exhibition has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
The London Open Live
4 June – 7 September 2025
Free
2025 will see the return of Whitechapel Gallery’s triennial, The London Open, established in 1932 and renowned for exhibiting and launching the careers of many of the UK’s best-known artists including Larry Achiampong, Veronica Ryan, Heather Phillipson and Anish Kapoor. Following an in-depth review of this ground-breaking initiative and consultation with a range of previous participants and specialist consultants, the gallery is launching a new format, which will consider a specific approach or theme for each edition.
For 2025, the focus will be on live art, and the gallery will invite artists to submit proposals for performances engaging with the broader theme of ‘London Open Live’, exploring what it means to live in London and be open at this time. The London cultural scene and particularly opportunities for younger emerging artists were badly affected by the Covid pandemic and its aftermath. London Open Live will celebrate coming together, fostering intimacy and proximity and address the appetite from audiences to see live art.
The programme will include work by established and emerging artists who work across and within definitions of ‘live art’ and will build on Whitechapel Gallery’s long history of commissioning and staging performance art. Performances will take place Thursday to Sunday throughout summer 2025 and will be accompanied by a film programme looking at contemporary performance practice.
Autumn 2025
Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey
8 October 2025 – 11 January 2026
Ticketed
In 2025, Whitechapel Gallery will present the first major retrospective exhibition of the artist Joy Gregory (b.1959), winner of the eighth annual Freelands Awards, and one of the most innovative artists working with photography today. Gregory has influenced generations of younger artists and played a critical role in the development of photography nationally and internationally since the early 1980s.
Since the 1980s, Gregory has been at the forefront of exploring the wider cultural politics of identity, race and gender, whilst also expanding photography’s aesthetic and material possibilities and experimenting with the medium’s physical properties, from Victorian printing techniques to digital photography. Creating exquisite photographs that embrace the compelling beauty of the medium, Gregory’s work avoids an overtly critical approach in favour of drawing in her viewers by using aesthetic pleasure to trigger a response. She has described her practice as being political ‘with a small p, on the basis that you catch more flies with honey.’
The exhibition will be displayed across the galleries and will include over 100 works, made over her forty-year career and spanning analogue and digital photography, video, installation, performance and textiles, and addressing complex themes such as beauty, language endangerment, the transatlantic slave trade and the diasporic experience, often through the lens of her own experience as a child of Jamaican parents born in rural England.
The exhibition demonstrates Whitechapel Gallery’s dedication to support the work of women artists and artists of colour and the exhibition will offer audiences an intimate and in-depth opportunity to explore the full breadth and depth of Gregory’s work. The exhibition will include her delicate still life and interior photographs, her iconic early self-portraiture and later portraits, and series including Objects of Beauty (1992-1995), Memory & Skin (1998), Handbag Project (1998-2005), The Blonde (1995-1999), Cinderella Tours Europe (1997-2001) as well as film works such as Fairest (1995-2005), Gomera (2005-2010) and her poetic and haunting film installation Seeds of Empire (2021).
Gregory also will produce a newly commissioned work supported by the Freelands Foundation that explores the common threads that connect the communities in the Kalahari Desert with whom Gregory is currently working, and the experiences of the descendants of indigenous and enslaved people in the Caribbean and the Americas.
Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey has been generously supported by Freelands Foundation and Cockayne – Grants for the Arts: a donor advised fund held at The London Community Foundation. Research for this exhibition has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Candice Lin
8 October 2025 – 11 January 2026
Free
The 2025 Whitechapel Gallery annual commission is from LA-based artist Candice Lin. This commission represents Lin’s return to London, nine years on from her first solo exhibition System for a Stain, held at Gasworks, London in 2016. Lin’s practice of telling stories through multisensorial environments has developed significantly through site-specific projects at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2024); Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2024); 13th and 14th Gwangju Biennale (2021 and 2023); Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan (2023); Spike Island, Bristol (2022); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021).
Lin’s art explores marginalised histories, colonial legacies and the materials that connect them. Through a research-based practice, she invokes and interrogates these themes, giving them sensuous reality through an eclectic mix of substances like tobacco, lard, opium poppies or cochineal bugs. In each case, Lin activates the audience within her layered installations, bringing detailed histories and research to life and encourages viewers to question the past, present and future.
Candice Lin has been generously supported by the Whitechapel Gallery Commissioning Council: Dorota Audemars, Erin Bell, Émilie de Pauw, Irene Panagopoulos and Nicole Saikalis Bay; and The Ampersand Foundation.
Press Information
For more information, interviews and images, contact:
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Notes to Editors
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
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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.
Will Ferreira Dyke
Communications Assistant
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