We are pleased to announce our programme for 2024 that showcases pioneering women artists and foregrounds local communities and emerging artists within a global context.
Highlights of the 2024 programme include: large-scale UK solo exhibitions by leading women artists Pia Arke, Permindar Kaur, and Sarah Pierce; new commissions exploring legacy of sugar production on Mauritius by Gayle Chong Kwan and history of the Basque Children by Sonia Boué & Ashok Mistry; and Community Takeover, focusing on food and wellbeing in relation to the climate emergency.
Pia Arke: Silences and Stories
10 February–11 May 2024
In collaboration with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, we present the first major survey of Danish-Greenlandic artist Pia Arke (1958–2007) to be shown outside of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), and the Nordic countries. Silences and Stories includes photography, film, sculpture, performance, writing, and rare archival material, amassed from a range of key collections, archives and individuals throughout Scandinavia and Greenland. Silences and Stories will clearly assert Pia Arke as a significant international figure within both artistic practice and post-colonial discourse. Questions of nationhood, identity and female representation, are highlighted alongside the impact of climate change and global economics on indigenous communities throughout the arctic regions.
Gayle Chong Kwan: A Pocket Full of Sand
10 February–11 May 2024
In partnership with Film and Video Umbrella, we are proud to present a major new commission by artist Gayle Chong Kwan. Exploring colonial histories, geology and ecological deep time, A Pocket Full of Sand unearths both historic and contemporary connections between Mauritius and the Isle of Wight. The artist connects her research of the islands with political and physical structures of power, labour, leisure, childhood and play. The exhibition comprises a multipart installation bringing together moving image, photography and sculpture. Chong Kwan’s works act within and against histories of oppression and positions the viewer as one element in a cosmology of the political, social and ecological.
Permindar Kaur: Nothing is Fixed
8 June–7 September 2024
Permindar Kaur is a sculptor and installation artist who utilises familiar forms, such as furniture and toys, to create displaced domestic belongings and settings that invoke the uncanny. Transforming John Hansard Gallery into an immersive set of installations, Nothing is Fixed explores fundamental issues of home, belonging, care and safety. Kaur focuses on the intersectionality of identity; how society, family and education inform unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Alongside the exhibition, Kaur is also developing a co-created public sculpture with local artists and audiences that will be presented to complement Southampton’s Mela festival, as part of Co-Creating Public Space.
Community Takeover
8 June–7 September 2024
Community Takeover returns with a range of vibrant, creative responses to themes exploring cookery, food waste, climate emergency and wellbeing. Working with schools, local charities, artists, and community leaders, this exhibition explores what we can do to help each other, our planet, and our health. Come along to enjoy a lively assortment of displays, films and workshops, including work created by local pupils, asylum seekers and refugees from Southampton & Winchester Visitors Group and young people involved in our regular Engagement projects.
Sarah Pierce: Scene of the Myth
5 October 2024–11 January 2025
Scene of the Myth is an expansive solo exhibition by the artist Sarah Pierce that consists of performances, videos, installations, and archives. Pierce has developed a concept she names the “community of the exhibition” to describe how exhibitions have a particular ability to hold us, and works of art, in community. Scene of the Myth will include artworks that bring to the fore this ongoing and discerning interest in community’s tenuous and unavowable bonds.
Sonia Boué & Ashok Mistry: Las Gemelas
5 October 2024–11 January 2025
Artists Sonia Boué and Ashok Mistry are leading proponents of neuro-inclusive participatory arts practice in the UK. Together they have formed a collaborative neurodivergent art duo called Las Gemelas. Responding to the Basque Children archives of the University of Southampton’s Special Collections and their own heritage, Boué and Mistry are developing a new evolving installation that will premiere at John Hansard Gallery.
