Autumn 2022 Highlights

EXHIBITION

Moving Bodies, Moving Images

12 October 2022 – 9 January 2023

Galleries 1, 8 & 9 | Free entry

Whitechapel Gallery’s Moving Bodies, Moving Images features short films from the past decade by contemporary artists and choreographers who explore the intersection of dance, movement and moving image. The films are presented across a range of projections, screens and monitors dispersed throughout the galleries. All the works focus on performing bodies, and the exhibition explores topics such as gender, politics, desire, bodily memory, resistance, personal healing and collective identities. Artists include Alexandra Bachzetsis, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Eglė Budvytytė, Eric Minh Cuong Castaing, Alia Farid, Hetain Patel, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, and Alberta Whittle. The artists hail from across the globe and draw from modern and contemporary dance, as well as club, street and other vernacular dance forms, and movement therapy.

COMMISSION

Zadie Xa: House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness

20 September 2022 – May 2023

Gallery 2 | Free entry

Korean-Canadian artist, Zadie Xa (b.1983) presents her largest solo exhibition in London to date this autumn, a new body of work commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery. Xa has created an immersive installation where sculptures, textiles and paintings act as ‘tricksters’ and ‘shapeshifters’ in and amongst a large-scale fabric structure that resembles a house or a home. Choreographed lighting and audio transform the Whitechapel Gallery’s historic architecture into a dreamscape that suggests ideas of liminality and transience. Drawing on her own background, the works on display reflect the artist’s ongoing engagement with hybrid and diasporic identities, global history, folklore, and spiritual and religious rituals. Xa’s art seeks to elevate narratives that have been erased and repressed by the West and occupying powers. Her artworks are a means to analyse and process socio-political conditions and cultural behaviours through a lens of masquerade, play, costuming and storytelling.

COLLECTION

ARCHIVES

Out of the Margins: Performance in London’s institutions from the 1990s – 2010s

30 August 2022 – 15 January 2023

Gallery 4 | Free entry

This exhibition examines the shift in institutional relationships to performance art that has taken place since the 1990s, highlighting key moments that raised this cultural practice from underground and marginalised to a visible and well-acknowledged art form. Including seminal moments from Lois Keidan’s incorporation and adaption of Franko B’s underground nightclub performances at the ICA; to the inception of the Live Art Development Agency and the milestone survey exhibition A Short History of Performance (I, II, III, IV) held at the Whitechapel Gallery (2002-2006) which invited re-enactments by Carolee Schneemann, Jannis Kounellis and Hermann Nitsch among others. Through these and other events that followed, performance art confirmed its role in the institutional realm, warranting a dedicated space in the Tanks at Tate in 2012. The exhibition includes rarely seen archive material, documentation, and films of performances from this period as well as key references to a number of artists, theoreticians and cultural producers who elevated the status of performance within the visual arts.

PROJECT

Tracing Absence

20 August 2022 – 2 January 2023

Galleries 5 & 6 | Free entry

Ten emerging curators from Whitechapel Gallery’s and London South Bank University’s Curating Art and Public Programmes MA have collaborated to present Tracing Absence. Taking as its starting point the collectively lived experience of isolation and the recent change in our rituals and structures, this exhibition approaches the concept of nothingness as encapsulating the potential for regenerative futures. Through sound installation and a selection of works drawn from the Christen Sveaas Foundation, the galleries represent the aesthetics of the void, and the character of absence as ubiquitous, fleeting, and destabilising.