Summer is in full bloom and new exciting art shows are happening in East London this July! Enjoy our new self-led walk of late openings as part of Whitechapel Gallery‘s First Thursdays. The Walking Route of tonight will start as usual from our Gallery and head to three more spaces for a fifty-minute walk.
The first stop will be at Raven Row (6:30 to 8:30 pm) for the first UK exhibition of internationally established artist Ibon Aranberri, (b. 1969, Spain). In “Unequal Diameters,” you will encounter objects, films, drawings, and photographs that recount and reconfigure half-familiar situations and forms. From a mountaineering expedition to drawings for trainee steel welders, makeshift urban security, and a habitat for bats, Aranberri’s multidisciplinary approach captivates the imagination and invites viewers to engage with a questioning attitude toward the natural environment and its constructed representations. In recent years, the artist exhibited for prominent European institutions, including Kunsthalle Basel, Documenta 12, and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
The second stop will be at Moosey Gallery (6 – 8 pm), for the solo exhibition of the Hamburg-based artist Hamburg-based artist Nanhee Kim (b. 1993, South Korea). In “We Were All Once Virgins”, Kim impartially examines her own persona from an external standpoint. By employing metaphorical expressions derived from personal encounters, she portrays shared life circumstances to capture the essence of human existence. While most paintings predominantly feature Kim’s visage, her ultimate aim is to stimulate viewers to engage in introspective contemplation of their own unique experiences and perspectives. Playing with these inputs, Kim creates humorous and absurd situations that are both playful and thought-provoking. Through her work, she aims to explore the boundaries between reality and fiction, often blurring the lines between the two to create a surreal and colourful world.
The walking route will conclude at Auto Italia (6-8 pm) with Shaun Motsi‘s (b. 1989, Zimbabwe) thought-provoking moving image work, “Masters“. The film explores how knowledge production and distribution is used to perpetuate social and racial hierarchies, and how biases within spaces of learning shapes how information is formed and shared. The work offers an approach for destabilising established methodologies of constructing an ontology of identity in cinema, continuing Motsi’s interest in obfuscating representations of Black subjects, and scrutinising cultural extractions of Blackness within visual cultures. Masters is co-commissioned by Auto Italia, London and Haus der Kunst, Munich.
