Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter
Auto Italia, London
24 September – 5 December 2021
“The first international solo exhibition by US-based artists Chuquimamani-Condori (Elysia Crampton Chuquimia) and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton. In a newly commissioned moving image, the artists, who are members of the Pakaxa Aymara nation, enact a ceremony for their grandmother and explore their family’s rituals around death. Underpinned by the nation’s abolitionist traditions as inseparable from the Black radical tradition, this project attests to different spacetimes and ways of imagining as ‘abolition geographies’ (Ruthie Gilmore Wilson, 2017).”
SERAFINE1369: FROM DARKNESS INTO DARKNESS
Tate Britain, London
24 September 2021 – 3 January 2022
“SERAFINE1369's practice is always relational, moving across spaces, contexts, scales, roles and collaborations. Their work often involves sculpture, text, electronic music, video, internal narratives, texture and trance states to build atmospheric landscapes. Choreographies become a type of stage, dreamscape or battleground through the live unfolding of tensions between things that create meaning. Moving through mythological archetypes of monstrous creatures, from darkness into darkness considers what it means to be or feel haunted, host to multiple entities – existing in the tensions between coming together and coming apart.”
Onyeka Igwe: a so-called archive
Lux, London
8 September – 17 October 2021
“With a forensic lens, Onyeka Igwe’s a so-called archive interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire. Blending footage shot over 2020 in two separate colonial archive buildings – one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom – this double portrait considers the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials. Igwe’s film imagines what might have been ‘lost’ from these archives. It mixes the genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour, and detective noir, with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery.”
Carl Gent: Over the fallow flood
Jupiter Woods, London
8 September – 3 October 2021
“Over the fallow flood is an exhibition of sculptures, texts, audio work and performances made during Carl Gent’s extensive research and development period hosted by Jupiter Woods in 2020-21. It marks the first of two sister shows showcasing Gent's recent work that looks into rehistoricising the biography of Cynethryth, eighth-century Queen of Mercia, to reflect on the ways in which patriarchal powers control how our culture is documented and recorded.”
Tip of the Iceberg
Focal Point Gallery, Southend
12 September 2021 – 9 January 2022
“This exhibition explores the relationship between art and alternative growing practices, which are increasingly coming together in pursuit of climate action and social justice. New and recent works by local and international artists explore three key themes: the notion of the ‘commons’, i.e. our common right to the earth’s natural resources (air, water, soil, land); how plants can be considered as both witnesses and agents across history, and how local hidden economies can act as catalysts for wider change.”
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: Haunting Alongside Our Shadows
QUAD, Derby
25 September – 9 January 2022
“An entirely new body of ambitious, digital and interactive artworks. Working alongside her community of Black Trans Femmes, [Brathwaite-Shirley] has created animated ghostly imaginings of her non-gendered ancestors – whose existence is recorded and presented in glyphs, song and motion-captured dancing bodies that will appear as phantom-like figures across the gallery... Mixing horror with futuristic fiction, visitors will be guided through this multisensory exhibition and required to think of how their own stories and ancestral histories are interlinked with the histories of Black Trans people. The entire gallery space will react depending on where the viewer is and what they do. Unable to passively consume the art, the visitor instead must put in work to access the content in each artwork.”
Tacita Dean
Frith Street Gallery, London
From 17 September 2021
“Taking place across the gallery’s two spaces in Golden Square and Soho Square, Frith Street Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Tacita Dean. At the Golden Square gallery, the ground floor will feature works relating to Dean’s forthcoming designs for The Dante Project, a new commission by The Royal Ballet set to receive its world premiere at London’s Royal Opera House in October 2021. Based on Dante Alighieri’s 1320 longform narrative poem The Divine Comedy, the ballet is choreographed by The Royal Ballet’s Resident Choreographer Wayne McGregor and features a new composition by conductor-composer Thomas Adès. Dean’s sets move from the stark black-and-white negative backdrop for Inferno, through the strange, transitional state of Purgatorio before emerging into a celebration of colour in Paradiso, the final act.”
Theaster Gates: A Clay Sermon
Whitechapel Gallery, London
29 September 2021 – 9 January 2022
“In Christian scripture, the relationship between God and humanity is analogous to the potter working with clay. ‘As a potter’, according to Theaster Gates, ‘you learn how to shape the world’. Clay and religion are foundational to the artistic practice of the Chicago based artist who has received international acclaim for his community and cultural interventions in Black space, particularly on the South Side of Chicago. As a youth, Gates joined the New Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church choir and, subsequently, studied urban planning, theology and ceramics.”