Anthea Hamilton: Mash Up

Mash Up, the first major survey exhibition of works by British artist Anthea Hamilton, opens at M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp on February 17, 2022.

For nearly two decades, Anthea Hamilton has developed a complex practice that spans sculpture, installation, film and performance. Hamilton dives without restraint into the meandering history of visual and cultural production, using her eye as a both subjective and productive lens through which to view (and recreate) the world. Her installations—which combine unexpected materials, scale and humour—propose an alternative and fragmented reality where gender roles, sexualities, food, domestic life, nature, and the traditions of different cultures, all rescind their status of firmly established clichés and become fluid notions. Hamilton’s practice therefore relies on a strong belief in cohabitation, complexity and, by extension, imagination, positing the artworks’ ontological ambiguity as a means to constantly challenge our perceived realities.

Using the “mash up” as her method, she masterfully filters and assesses elements culled from the present and recent past of fashion, art, food, nature, design, architecture and pop culture. She then resituates what we might otherwise consider familiar or comforting tropes and motifs in a continuous bid to sidestep obvious and hegemonic meanings. 

Influenced by the early 20th-century French writer and dramatist Antonin Artaud and his call for the “physical knowledge of images,” Hamilton aims to elicit a bodily response to an idea or an image when we encounter her works. The artist is best known for creating compelling and immersive large-scale statement pieces in which bodies, images, materials and spaces perform under the terms and conditions of a particular frame. 

Mash Up seeks to consolidate Hamilton’s artistic language and further establish the artist’s idiosyncratic voice. Its aim is to draw a comprehensive and precise picture of a practice characterised by devotional creativity, unexpected research trajectories, highly visual aesthetics, cross cultural interests, and interdisciplinary modes of production. Visitors are confronted by an exhibition of strong visual impact, inhabited by performative spaces and physical manifestations of images. Hamilton’s exhibition invites us to think about the knowledge of forms and images, and raises relevant questions on representation, identity politics, and methodologies of freedom. 

The exhibition at M HKA is the first opportunity to share an in-depth reading and articulation of Hamilton’s practice, whilst also opening up new perspectives and interpretations. Mash Up comprises no less than 70 works created by the artist throughout her career, alongside a series of new works, performances and exhibition-specific situations. Across 1800 square metres of exhibition space, existing works are staged alongside both new commissions and ways of looking at iconic past installations such as The Squash (Tate Britain, 2018), The New Life (Venice Biennale, 2019, and Secession, 2018), and Lichen! Libido! Chastity! (Turner Prize, 2016 and SculptureCenter, 2015). The exhibition testifies to the collaborative dynamic inherent to Hamilton’s practice by featuring co-creations with and affiliations to (amongst others): artist Nicholas Byrne, architect and designer Gaetano Pesce, gardener and writer Roger Phillips, performer Carlos Maria Romera, photographer Lewis Ronald, and LOEWE fashion house as directed by designer Jonathan Anderson. 

Curator: Anne-Claire Schmitz

Weekly performances take place on Saturdays in the exhibition spaces for the full duration of the exhibition. In collaboration with DE SINGEL, Antwerp, and as part of Carta 22, biennial festival of creation, 21–30 April 2022.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial monographic publication co-published by M HKA and Triangle Books, to be released concomitantly to the presentation in Antwerp. It will feature commissioned texts and a large volume of images testifying to the particular interest of Hamilton’s work as a visual producer, including exhibition views, source images, research material, and documentation of collaborations, as well as a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s oeuvre to date. The publication will be available in English and Dutch.
Commissioned texts by Cédric Fauq, Milovan Farronato, Anthea Hamilton, Anne-Claire Schmitz, and Linsey Young.
Release date: Spring 2022
Publishers: M HKA and Triangle Books
Editor: Anne-Claire Schmitz

With the main support of 
LOEWE

With the support of 
Ary Maes—AMS digital
Ivan Huybrechts—Stielmannen 
Claudio Marenzi—Herno 
Mildred and Simon Palley 
Marc Vandecandelaere—Wilgelover