Exhibition highlights from the Arts & Culture programme
Exhibition highlights from previous seasons
Explore a selection of the arts and culture programme's previous exhibitions shown at the °µÍø½âÃÜ's contemporary arts space The Levinsky Gallery, and online.
Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2023 | 4 May – 29 June 2024
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2023 was selected by three renowned figures in the contemporary art world.
Now in its 30th year, the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious open exhibition dedicated to drawing in the United Kingdom. The 2023 open call received over 3,000 submissions of contemporary drawings from 1,450 candidates representing 40 countries. From this remarkable worldwide submission, 123 drawings by 111 practitioners were selected for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2023 exhibition, which we were delighted to present in The Levinsky Gallery.
A panel of esteemed selectors comprising Laura Hoptman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center, New York; Dennis Scholl AM, collector and arts patron; and Barbara Walker MBE RA, artist and Turner Prize 2023 nominee, meticulously reviewed the submissions to select the shortlist and award-winners.
The award winners, collectively receiving £27,000 were:
- First Prize of £8,000: Jeanette Barnes, New Battersea Tube Station & Developments, 2023, Compressed charcoal on paper, 150 x 213cm
- Second Prize of £5,000: Victoria Hunter McKenzie, Tasha brought us Guinneps, 2022, charcoal, graphite on paper, 41 x 30.5cm
- Student Award of £2,000: Peter Blodau, El Kobri Maadi, 2023, charcoal on paper, 60 x 40cm
- Working Drawing Award of £2,000: Ade Olaosebikan, Reconstituted planes - The Barcelona Pavilion Reimagined 1 and 2, 2023, a digital drawing, 59 x 42cm, and a drawing made with a technical pencil on tracing paper, 84 x 59cm
- Evelyn Williams Drawing Award of £10,000 and solo exhibition at Hastings Contemporary: Isabel Rock for her exhibition proposal to be developed from her drawing Our Cell, 2022, biro on paper, 43 x 53cm
The Working Drawing Award is a special category within the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize that celebrates the role of drawing within architecture, design and making processes, chosen by a selection panel comprising Ben Heath, Principal, Grimshaw Architects; Debbie Hillyerd, Senior Director of Learning, Hauser & Wirth; and Michael Pavelka, costume and set designer for stage, dance and opera.
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2023 marked the 6th year of generous support from the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust for this annual open exhibition.
Caroline Burraway, Study for triptych-Displaced female, 2022, Graphite on paper, 40 x 50 cm, shortlisted for the TBW Drawing Prize 2023
World Illustration Awards 2023 Exhibition | 9 March – 20 April 2024
The WIA2023 Touring Exhibition was a fascinating, inspiring survey of the breadth and diversity of current illustration practice.
We were delighted to present the World Illustration Awards 2023 exhibition, in partnership with the Association of Illustrators (AOI), and the Directory of Illustration. With in-depth presentations of winning projects, the exhibition showcased the very best emerging and established illustrations from around the world today.
From book covers to newspapers, packaging to murals, illustration is the visual language of everyday life. This exhibition celebrated this most engaging of art forms in its broadest sense. Showcasing a diverse range of styles, materials and topics, featuring an extraordinary range of illustration practice across vibrant industry sectors, the exhibition revealed the innovative ideas and techniques at the forefront of illustration today.
The exhibition included the 20 Category Winners and 20 Highly Commended projects as well as the four Cross-Category Award Winners, and two Overall Winners.
Resonating Bodies explored the complexities of relationships between humans and machines. The exhibition responded to the fragility and uncertainty that we face in our increasingly digital and automated world. At a time when our sense of being is in a state of flux, the artists, Karen Abadie and Laura Rosser, lean into this unknown through the materiality of the machine. The interplay of human and nonhuman machine bodies are messy and challenged through the corporeality of the work. The machines resonate, clatter and converse in the space, through an entangling of analogue and low-fi technologies, celluloid, paper and ink. Each artist embraces the errors, slip-ups, scratches and ruptures that emerge through working with old, often broken, or malfunctioning technologies. The collective artworks posed questions around political, cultural and societal breaking down, which instead might be seen as a means to repair, renew, regenerate and refresh. The artists’ interdisciplinary practices challenge misconceptions of analogue machines as ‘obsolete’ or ‘outdated’ and reimagine human and nonhuman relationships in these precarious times.
Abadie’s practice explores what it is to be an embodied being in collaboration with the machine. The imagery presents apparently opposing embodied states that float and bounce around the exhibition space. The artwork offers a repositioning of these states with leaky messy boundaries as these materialities interweave, converse, entangle and collide. The celluloid film interacts with the heavy mass of the analogue machines, its tender surface becoming worn, scarred, scratched and even broken. The collision between human and nonhuman undeniably articulated by this apparent violence.
Rosser’s practice draws on expanded understandings of error to reimagine our relationships with machines, systems and online spaces. Working with her collection of dot matrix printers and printed ephemera, she creates live text-based installations that embrace liveliness as potential for unforeseen creativity, signalling a move away from conventions of logic and order. This work creates opportunity for diverse voices and new relations to emerge. Her playful use of language and translation disrupt – and interrupt – rational thought and digital structures; preferring the misadventurous and crooked path.
Ocean explored and celebrated our human connection with the water that covers over 70% of the planet. It did this from a number of different perspectives, bringing together world-leading researchers with contemporary artists and designers to create new works that invite a deeper understanding of the interconnected nature of land and sea. Including a science station for real world experiments, the exhibition also invited the public to get involved, forging a personal connection with the ocean, and our collective responsibility to protect it.
Situated in °µÍø½âÃÜ, a city that has long held a special connection to the sea, Ocean explored the city's unique natural harbour and maritime history that's steeped in a complex history of trading, culture, and colonial narratives. This encounter was amplified by the city's ongoing role as a global pioneer in marine research. The historical associations and ongoing journey painted a unique portrait of °µÍø½âÃÜ as a site of global resonance and local relevance. Ocean charted the human and environmental concerns that are raised within the climate crisis.
At the core of the exhibition, three commissioned works by Bridgette Ashton, Mat Chivers and Stefanie Posavec created a rich tapestry of ocean narratives informed by °µÍø½âÃÜ’s special significance. They explored the hidden secrets of Drake's Island, the awe-inspiring majesty of the Eddystone Lighthouse, and the intricate, underwater world of °µÍø½âÃÜ Sound. Each artist innovatively bridged the gap between science and art, offering an immersive, experiential exploration of the marine world.
Stefanie Posavec, an artist/designer who specialises in data visualisation, collaborated with the Marine Institute on a new work rendered within the gallery. Her playful presentation of real-life data sets invited the visitor to situate themselves in a volume of water equivalent to a specific area of °µÍø½âÃÜ Sound, and envision what is present within it; from the macro to the micro.
Mat Chivers’ short film Keepers, specially commissioned for the exhibition, featured the Eddystone Lighthouse. It considered how the precarious moment of change we’re in right now confronts us with the urgent need to focus our actions in a way that recognises our dependence on other-than-human life and ecologies, in the oceans and on land. Lighthouses remind us to proceed with caution.
Bridgette Ashton created a new sculptural work, Ictus, based on °µÍø½âÃÜ Sound’s iconic Drake’s Island. It referenced the history of the island, dating back to 1st century BCE, and the unreliable narratives that continue to add colour and complexity to accounts of the island and its heritage.
The exhibition was interactive, encouraging the public to participate in real-world experiments at the science station and explore the digital wonders of the marine world through the National Marine Park initiative. This innovative approach aimed to forge a personal connection between the community and the ocean, thus kindling a shared responsibility for its protection.
Ocean was a testament to The Arts Institute's transformative shift towards a more collaborative, inclusive, and connected approach. It encapsulated the key principles of the Institute, creating a forum where science and creativity meet, fostering an environment for progressive conversation, and encouraging societal, economic, and environmental growth.
The exhibition was curated by The Arts Institute in collaboration with the Marine Institute. A full programme of associated events accompanied the exhibition, including Bitesize gallery talks.
2.jpg)
2.jpg)
Sang-Mi Rha and Marianne Walker, two artists with distinct yet complementary practices, presented Otherworlds, where the lines between the real and the imagined, between 2D and 3D, blur and shift, to create works that intrigue and entice.
Sang-Mi Rha's paintings manifest a metaverse called Neither Nor, an autonomous construct, based on her peripatetic lived experiences and memories from having grown up across the four continents of the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe. Beginning by building cardboard animal-shaped masks, which are worn by the inhabitants – the children – of Neither Nor, Rha then works intimately with the painted surface to bring to life her alter ego Allen-the-Voyager and its entourage. The world seen through their eyes is idiosyncratic, a realm that is improbable, yet somehow familiar, and always full of surprise.
Marianne Walker's practice is an exploration of the medium of drawing in conversation with the material remains of the past. Pencil and ink knit together with the sculpted language of the form to become hybrid objects that hover between disciplines. Walker sees her practice as an act of enlivening, exploring an animistic approach to the plant and animal in the human. She interrogates the malleability of history and the storytelling aspects of the science of archaeology. The works also bear witness to Walker’s interest in folklore and devotional sculpture, their fragmentary forms morphing into signifiers of adaption and survival, that confront the viewer.
The Levinsky Gallery was delighted to welcome back Rha and Walker, both of whom exhibited in °µÍø½âÃÜ Contemporary 2021. Otherworlds showcased the development of their individual practices, which converged in this exhibition to create something truly unique and awe-inspiring.
Heidi Morstang: Field Observations | 11 February – 8 April 2023
Selected works that are an observation of a fragile natural environment.
Heidi Morstang: Field Observations presented selected films and photographic works, made since 2001, where landscape is the principal line of inquiry exploring various ways humans intervene with and in it.
The artworks, some made during interdisciplinary expeditions to unfamiliar geographic and conceptual terrain, are an observation of a fragile natural environment, and the increasing changes in the climate that has now become a global emergency. Morstang has filmed and photographed glaciers in the Arctic, boreal forests at midsummer, rapid light changes between polar night and day, and butterflies in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They feature geoscientists searching for ancient scars of earthquakes in the Arctic, scientists dedicating their lifetime work to the study of how climate change affects butterfly populations, and the beacon of hope in the form of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Supported by the Norwegian Embassy.
Heidi Morstang is an Associate Professor in Photography at °µÍø½âÃÜ.
Exhibitions from 2022 and earlier
1 / 18
British Art Show 9 | 8 October – 23 December 2022
This four venue, city-wide exhibition, welcomed 37 artists in total, including Abigail Reynolds, Cooking Sections and GAIKA who showed in The Levinsky Gallery.
2 / 18
Maurizio Anzeri: On The Move | 6 August – 11 September 2022
A major presentation of Italian artist Anzeri’s practice from the last decade.
3 / 18
Breaking the Mould | 26 March – 5 June 2022
Breaking the Mould challenged the male-dominated narratives of post-war British sculpture.
4 / 18
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters | 21 October 2021 – 27 February 2022
Using the power of art, performance, song, photography and multimedia, Songlines shared ancient stories from the world’s oldest continuing culture.
5 / 18
°µÍø½âÃÜ Contemporary 2021 | 7 July – 5 September 2021
An open submission exhibition showcasing the work of contemporary artists. Shown at The Levinsky Gallery and KARST.
6 / 18
Everywhere: Life in a littered world | 22 November 2020 – 31 January 2021
An online exhibition featuring eight international artists whose work explores everyday practices of littering.
7 / 18
Kehinde Wiley: Ship of Fools | 29 September – 20 December 2020
Wiley’s gaze into the world functions as a filter for narrating an alternative history about the representation of power, race and class.
8 / 18
Slow Painting | 24 January – 28 March 2020
A counterbalance to an accelerating world, works which illustrated the role of painting as a rewarding repository of time.
9 / 18
Mariner: a painted ship upon a painted ocean | 23 September-16 November 2019
A fascinating exhibition exploring the contemporary relevance of Coleridge's 18th-century poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
10 / 18
Jem Southam: Birds, Rocks, Rivers, Islands | 18 January-16 March 2019
Leading UK photographer and Professor Emeritus of Photography at the University, renowned for his series of colour landscape photographs.
11 / 18
Great Artists | Great Teachers | 17 September-17 November 2018
Bringing together the works of some of the most influential artists/teachers, in celebration of the Royal Academy of Arts' 250th Anniversary.
12 / 18
Trevor Bell: Trans-Form | 16 April-26 May 2018
A prestigious exhibition celebrating the monumental works of award-winning artist, Trevor Bell, before he sadly passed away in November 2017.
13 / 18
°µÍø½âÃÜ Contemporary 2017 | 15 July-2 September 2017
Bringing together a critically acclaimed selection panel of curators, art directors, artists and professionals whose fingers are on the pulse regarding the latest developments. Showcasing the next generation of artists to watch from across the world.
14 / 18
Douglas Gordon: Searching for Genius | 24 September-19 November 2016
The Searching for Genius exhibition – explored ideas about talent, virtuosity and genius – it also included items of local and historical importance such as the spectacles of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a Plymothian and founder of the Royal Academy.
15 / 18
Sea Swim: Head Above Water | 23 July-3 September 2016
Through film, photography, sculpture, drawing and poetry, it captured the sensations, stories and psychological impact brought about by the experience of swimming in the sea.
16 / 18
°µÍø½âÃÜ Young Contemporary Open l 2-9 July 2016
The exhibition featured selected artwork from an open call to artists and creative producers aged 4 to 30, responding to the theme GROW. The entrants were split into age groups, with a series of prizes being awarded.
17 / 18
Conversations Across Art and Mathematics | 9 April-28 May 2016
The ‘groundbreaking’ exhibition explored the ‘complex and creative relationship between art and mathematics’.
18 / 18
°µÍø½âÃÜ Contemporary 2015 | 11 July-29 August 2015
Over 1,200 submissions were received for the °µÍø½âÃÜ Contemporary in 2015 from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe and beyond and were displayed at the °µÍø½âÃÜ between 11 July-29 August 2015.
