This collaborative exhibition curated by Dr. Ana-Maria Milčić brings together works from the Ben Uri and William Allen Collections. With additional loans from Bernard Moxham and the Chelsea College of Arts Library, as well as the artists Astra Papachristodoulou and Osman Yousefzada.
This exhibition traces more than a century of artistic experimentation with the relationship between words and images. It spans early-twentieth-century historical avant-garde practices through post-war developments in concrete poetry to contemporary art.
Beginning with the émigré artist Kurt Schwitters and his pioneering collages, the exhibition traces successive waves of migration and the questions they raise. It moves through artists displaced by the Second World War, including Alfred Lomnitz, Hugo Dachinger, Gustav Metzger, and Shmuel Dresner. The word-image experiments in their works, like the pieces throughout this show, belong to a wider tradition that runs from Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams (poetry arranged into visual form) through the experiments of the Cubists, Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, and Surrealists, and their works here continue in that line of using newspapers and scraps of paper. The exhibition then moves to a later generation, among them Henri Chopin, Astrid Furnival, Hansjörg Mayer, John Sharkey, Li Yuan-chia, Susan Hiller, and Verdi Yahooda, who arrived in the UK during the post-war period. Ian Hamilton Finlay and Dom Sylvester Houédard complicate any stable sense of Britishness, while David Medalla, José Maria Cruxent, and Martha Hellion speak to the countercultural energies of the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, Tam Joseph, Hormazd Narielwalla, Astra Papachristodoulou, and Osman Yousefzada bring questions of identity and migration into the present.
For the exhibition guide, prepared for educational purposes, contibuting texts by Nandika Bali, Taylor Beidler, Ariel Finch, Justin Piperger, Ian Robson, and Greg Thomas. Narielwalla’s artwork was chosen to feature on the cover of the catalogue
More about the exhibition can be viewed here.