What is Truth?: The latest exhibitions at Norwich's Sainsbury Centre
We visit Sainsbury Centre as it showcases some of the most vital, timely art of the moment...
By
Susan Gray
March 13, 2024
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
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Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre, believes museums and galleries, rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century, are answering questions nobody is asking. Gallery goers are no longer looking for affirmation that art history is an arc of continuous progress, or to feel that material culture is appropriately cherished through institutions exercising ownership over objects, and permitting heavily mediated access to visitors. Instead, Cooper wants to surrender the gallery’s role as the authority on contemporary concerns around artificial intelligence and the climate crisis and address issues through collaboration and temporary artistic interventions.
Housed on the plate glass, landscaped campus of the University of East Anglia, Norman Foster’s metal and glass, open-plan structure is the ideal site for a move away from conventional ideas about what a gallery is for. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s permanent art collection – figurative pieces from across the globe and millennia that resonated with the collecting couple on an emotional level – makes the perfect backdrop to Cooper’s ideas of art objects as living entities, with which visitors form their own relationship.
Pulled together at breakneck speed in five months by senior curator Tania Moore, What Is Truth is a six-month investigation into deep fakes, conspiracy theories, iconic images and portrayals of gender and sexuality.
The show begins with In Event of Moon Disaster, the Emmy Award-winning interactive experience by American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta, garnering nearly 400,000 views on YouTube in four years. On a reproduction late 1960s television we watch footage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and then see and hear President Nixon deliver a speech on Apollo 11’s destruction. In Event of Moon Disaster combines simple editing techniques – real footage from within the spacecraft has been cut to make it look like something is wrong – and sophisticated artificial intelligence. The visuals of President Nixon come from his resignation speech, hence his serious, downcast expression. But the audio is an actor reading the pre-prepared, never delivered moon disaster speech, with AI matching the actor’s speech and movements to the image. It is important to Burgund and Panetta to talk about how the piece is made, so the audience is under no illusion as to the ingredients making up the sausage.
Viewing Tricky Dickie’s ‘speech’ as if in a late 1960s family living room complete with starburst clock, tiled coffee table, lava lamp and specially designed Austin Powers-style geometric wallpaper, is a more disconcerting experience than watching it on a laptop in familiarly 2024 surroundings. In the 1950s and 1960s excitement around the Space Race led to futuristic designs for the home, using plastics and mass production techniques, bringing a taste of an optimistic technological future to a new breadth of consumers. On the coffee table is a copy of The Reformer, a newspaper the artists made to reinforce the timeslip into 1969, with the headline ‘Astronauts Stranded on Moon’.
Exposed, raw timber supports behind the installation, and a period door to walk through to continue around the gallery, underline the atmospheric techniques and cues of manipulation. A nearby display of art from the era, from Sainsbury’s own collection, including a primary coloured, geometric silk screen by Auguste Herbin, Composition from album of twelve prints (1959), Andy Warhol’s Shopping Bag (1966), a pink and orange silkscreen of a Campbell tomato soup tin on a paper bag, and Elisabeth Frink’s ink on paper, expressionist face in a huge hood, Untitled (1960), raises further questions about which defining images endure, and what is lost.
Tank Man is the initial display of a section entitled The Camera Never Lies, which will fully open on 18 May. Tank Man offers three images of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Photographs from Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener and Charlie Cole, all show a lone male protester in a white tee shirt standing in front of a tank. Accompanying news footage continues the protester’s story, informing us he climbed on the tank, and was then taken away. His identity and what happened to him remain unknown.
Liquid Gender showcases the work of American artists Rashaad Newsome and Martine Gutierrez. Making their UK premiere, Gutierrez’s Demons (2018) depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yoruba traditions to frightening effect. Ugandan-born artist Leilah Babirye plays with the idea of identity through a series of works on paper depicting exaggerated, po-faced mug shots in Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2021).
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, and his site-specific installation No Simple Word for Time is his first UK solo show. A case of indigenous American objects including dolls and decorated, animal skin containers called parfleches, were chosen by the artist from Pitt Rivers. After visiting the Oxford museum Gibson said he had a sense that some of the available objects had sacred connotations, and were not suitable for public display. The artist’s short film To Feel Myself Beloved of the Earth, made during the pandemic, shows dancers and performers in ceremonial clothes in woodland and water and empty rooftops. Footage of a dancer modestly pulling up their decorated top, only to let it drop and reveal a muscled torso, then adopting classic strong man poses, playfully highlights issues of appearance, behaviour and gender norms.
