Unmissable London Art & Design Events This September
By Something CuratedWith a busy programme of exciting events, September is a great time to reconnect with London’s museums, galleries, fairs and festivals. Something Curated has compiled a list of exhibitions and events to satisfy your cultural needs this month.
London Design Biennale 2016
Somerset House
7-27 September
The first Design Biennale taking place in London will present works from 37 countries exploring the theme of utopia by design. Director of the Biennale, Dr Christopher Turner, explains how the centrality of the theme is fundamental to establishing a strong coherence and curated unity between all participating countries and territories. The event will explore questions about sustainability, migration, pollution, energy, cities, and social equality, offering a range of interactive installations, innovations, artworks and proposed design solutions – all in an immersive, inspiring and entertaining tour of the world.
Giuseppe Penone: Fui, Saro, Non Sono (I was, I will be, I am not)
Marian Goodman Gallery
8 September-21 October
Marian Goodman Gallery is hosting two concurrent exhibitions of works by Giuseppe Penone. These new shows bring together a selection of works related to the sense of touch, taking their form from gestures made by the artist’s hand. The works presented in both exhibitions, the titles of which refer to past, future and present, explore Penone’s belief that human gestures and tactile perceptions are connected to individuality and time. He notes: “A form without a human gesture is a collective present; with a gesture, it is an individual present.”
Fluxland
Various locations, River Thames
8-30 September
Fluxland is a new interactive artwork, sound piece and space for debate by French artist Cyril de Commarque, coming to London this month. A 25-metre long former freight boat mounted with a mirrored polyhedron sculptural form will navigate the Thames on a series of journeys over the course of the month. Fluxland will reflect the passing buildings across its angled facets, mirroring elements of the city skyline. This event is part of ‘Totally Thames’ programme. Visitors will be able to hear the artist’s soundtrack of samples sourced from all over the world, and the boat will moor regularly in locations where viewers will be able to board and experience its immersive environment.
The Infinite Mix
180 The Strand
9 September–20 November
Hayward Gallery present the organisation’s only major offsite exhibition, during a refurbishment of the Southbank site, housed within the iconic 180 The Strand. Pioneering new approaches to combining sounds and images, the artworks in The Infinite Mix engage us in ways that are conceptually as well as emotionally immersive. The show features audiovisual installations by leading British and international artists, including Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Kahlil Joseph, Elizabeth Price and Ugo Rondinone to name a few. Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff describes the works as ‘both soulful and audacious,’ their compelling back-and-forth between sound and picture drawing us into a conceptual and visceral engagement, which is heightened by the atmosphere of the labyrinthine Brutalist building.
Wifredo Lam
Tate Modern
14 September-8 January
Born in Cuba, Wifredo Lam (1902 – 1982) pursued a successful artistic career within avant-garde circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and was closely associated with twentieth-century artistic and literary icons such as Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Aimé Césaire, Lucio Fontana and Asger Jorn. His work poetically addresses themes of social injustice, nature and spirituality, and was greeted internationally with both consternation and acclaim. A witness to twentieth-century political upheaval throughout his long career – including the Spanish Civil War and the evacuation of artists and intellectuals from France with the onset of World War II – Lam defined a new and unique way of painting for a post-colonial world. Lam’s work now brings a historical perspective to contemporary issues. This exhibition celebrates Lam’s life and work and confirms his place at the centre of global modernism.
London Design Festival
Various locations, London
17-25 September
The London Design Festival is an annual event conceived by Sir John Sorrell and Ben Evans, and is held to celebrate and promote London as the design capital of the world, and as the gateway to the international creative community. The annual festival has been showcasing the work of designers, architects, artists and retailers since 2003. This year, more than 400 large-scale installations, exhibitions and events pop up in many unique spaces across London, from world-famous museums to small local studios.
Open House London
Various locations, London
17-18 September
Many of London’s architecturally significant buildings, usually not accessible to the public, are open during a weekend later this month. The event allows access to more than 850 of the city’s sites and buildings – including London landmarks like Lancaster House, Battersea Arts Centre, The Barbican Centre and the Bank of England, as well of residences and office spaces designed by the likes of David Adjaye, Richard Rogers and lesser known architects. It is an opportunity to explore the city’s leading establishments, gain unique insight into their architecture, and engage in dialogue.
William Kentridge
Whitechapel Gallery
21 September-15 January
South African artist, filmmaker and opera director William Kentridge will bring his stop-animation films to Whitechapel Gallery. The exhibition comprises of large-scale drawn, erased, and reworked charcoal drawings, and an assortment of installations, all addressing issues relating to the human condition. Highlights of the show, curated by Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery Director, include Kentridge’s five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012).
James Richards
Institute of Contemporary Arts
21 September-13 November
The Cardiff-born artist’s rhythmically edited medleys bring together self-shot digital and found VHS footage, nature and pornography, art-historical and instructional material. Tonally and texturally, they move between positive and colour-reversed imagery, pin-sharp and ‘poor’. Yet these aren’t abstruse codices, nor are they formalist demonstration pieces. Rather, the transient signals and tempers resulting from Richards’s juxtapositions reflect connoting’s chanciness, montage’s heavy lifting. What we see is finessed by what we just saw, by what comes next, by soundtracks and by the quiddities of contemporary technology. Along the way, they speak of how the self might speak through secondhand materials.
We Live in the Office
The Architecture Gallery, RIBA
22 September-5 February
This autumn, RIBA invites visitors to explore the repurposed Architecture Gallery. Multi-disciplinary artist Giles Round focuses on one of the most familiar and unavoidable architectural features of the city: the façade. By turning the gallery into a production studio and shop, this exhibition questions the ways in which we collect, preserve and purchase façades today. Inspired by the work of a wide-range of architects in RIBA’s Collections, it explores the increasing tension between the changing interior and static exterior of the architecture around us and our subsequently unreliable understanding of cities and spaces.
Mike Kelley: Framed and Frame
Hauser & Wirth
23 September-19 November
For the gallery’s first UK exhibition devoted to Mike Kelley, Hauser & Wirth presents a single monumental installation from 1999: ‘Framed and Frame’. Kelley was fascinated by Middle America’s many diverse and alternative subcultures, and through his work he became both a participant in and commentator on their cultural conventions and constructions. Taking Los Angeles’ marginalised Chinese-American community as its inspiration, ‘Framed and Frame’ explores the conceptual space between real and imagined places. Two photographic diptychs – ‘Color and Form’ (1999) and ‘Pre and Post (diptych)’ (1999 – 2000) – which Kelley viewed as important accompaniments to the installation, are also on display.
Abstract Expressionism
The Royal Academy
24 September-21 January
In the “age of anxiety” surrounding the Second World War and the years of free jazz and Beat poetry, artists like Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning broke from accepted conventions to unleash a new confidence in painting. This autumn, the RA brings together some of the most celebrated art of the past century, offering the chance to experience the powerful collective impact of Pollock, Rothko, Still, de Kooning, Newman, Kline, Smith, Guston and Gorky, as their works dominate the galleries with their scale and vitality. The exhibition will be curated by art historian Dr David Anfam, alongside Edith Devaney.
The Boldness of Calder
Louisa Guinness Gallery
27 September -5 November
Louisa Guinness Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in the UK of Alexander Calder’s jewellery: The Boldness of Calder. The exhibition brings together major pieces of Calder jewellery from around the world, presented amongst iconic images of the jewellery being worn on notable women throughout history, as well as contemporary images commissioned especially for the show.
Donna Huanca
Zabludowicz Collection, London
29 September- 18 December
When the Zabludowicz Collection announced that Donna Huanca would do its first performance commission, it seemed like strange news for a museum that typically funds projects involved with the digital, like recent video installations by Jon Rafman and Ryan Trecartin. Though very different in its approach, Huanca’s work is also about how humans act in spaces like the Internet, where users take on personas—in a sense putting on new skins. This is literally what Huanca’s performers often do in her pieces, which involve them covering themselves in colorful paint and then gradually removing it by touching their surroundings. For her commission, Huanca’s performers will respond to a three-story glass structure that suggests screens, dirtied over time like the surfaces of iPads.
Curated by Tamara Akcay