Exhibitions programme 2022

Featuring: Lucy Stein, Bassam Al-Sabah, RESOLVE, Minoru Nomata, Zineb Sedira

Spring: January 30–May 2

Lucy Stein: Wet Room
Obsessive, unashamedly emotional and loaded with a strong psychological charge, Lucy Stein’s work incorporates a heady mixture of styles and references. Weaving together personal experiences with feminist and psychoanalytic theory, mythology and religion, her drawings, paintings and installations draw upon the concept of the “female gaze” to question the representation of women in art history. Since moving to St Just, Cornwall in 2015, Stein has become deeply involved in the history and folkloric traditions of the Cornish landscape. The exhibition centres around an installation comprising a bathtub and sink with running taps, surrounded by tiled walls hand-painted with scenes relating to the artist’s study of western esoteric traditions. Surrounding this central installation is a series of new paintings and drawings made during Stein’s second pregnancy and throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, which reflect on a period of intensive domestic caregiving and anxiety. Stein has also drawn upon the modernist history and coastal setting of the De La Warr Pavilion through a new tile-based work made in response to this context.

Lucy Stein: Wet Room is commissioned and produced by Spike Island in Bristol, where it was on display from 25 September 2021 to 16 January 2022.

Bassam Al-Sabah: I AM ERROR
Bassam Al-Sabah’s exhibition explores the construction of masculinity in action-adventure video games through video, painting and sculpture, creating fantasy dreamscapes in which personal mythology, historical trauma and queer possibility intersect. The centrepiece is a 28-minute-long animation projected on to a large curved screen. It features a collection of cinematic sequences from an imaginary game in which the hero’s body is constantly in flux, undergoing metamorphoses as a result of their encounter with other lifeforms, whose physical touch makes them vulnerable to change. Combining fantasy erotica and body horror, Al-Sabah’s film celebrates the hero’s growth and transformation, as their body sprouts and blends into its surroundings, among writhing flowers and tentacular creatures. The show is punctuated by digitally sculpted objects that explore the materiality of organic decay, extending the eerie atmosphere of Al-Sabah’s animations into the gallery space. 

Commissioned and produced by Gasworks, London, in partnership with the De La Warr Pavilion, with the generous support of the Freelands Foundation.

Summer: May 21–September 4

RESOLVE
RESOLVE is an interdisciplinary design collective combining architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. They have delivered numerous projects, workshops, publications, and talks in the UK and across Europe, all of which look toward realising just and equitable visions of change in our built environment. Their major new commission, realised in partnership with the De La Warr Pavilion, Wellcome Collection and West Dean College makes use of the rich resources and histories at each partner site to investigate humanity’s entangled relationship with the vegetal world, inviting new perspectives on environmentalism, re-wilding, and practical solutions to living equitably with others and in nature. Researching new and ancient approaches to land use while on residency at West Dean College, the collective has been collaborating with young people in Bexhill-on-Sea and London to create new commissions for this solo exhibition and inclusion in the Wellcome Collection’s Rooted Beings exhibition (24 March – 29 August 2022). Titled What The Wild Things Are, the project surveys the geographical, political and ecological contexts of each institution – the coastal, the urban and the rural – probing predeterminations of what and who is “wild” in these contexts and challenging our preconceived separation of built and “natural” environments.

Minoru Nomata
The visionary paintings of Minoru Nomata depict imaginary landscapes that transcend time and place. Featuring architectural superstructures and topographical forms devoid of human presence, his uncanny depictions are portals into mysterious and uncertain worlds. Growing up in Tokyo’s industrial district of Meguro during a period of rapid urban and economic growth in Japan, Nomata became fascinated by the structural design of factories, chimneys, and water towers. At the Tokyo University of the Arts he studied European and Asian art, particularly classical Islamic patterns, and became drawn to the Machine Age and the modernism of American Precisionist, Charles Sheeler. It is these formative influences that have remained a constant in how Nomata creates each of his works, which blend the industrial, the fantastical, the archaic and the futuristic. Brutalist in beauty, aerodynamic in form and ambient in their atmosphere, Nomata’s landscapes are meditations on an ever-changing world and vehicles to alternative futures. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition outside of Asia.

Autumn: September 24, 2022–January 8, 2023

Zineb Sedira
Spanning both of the De La Warr Pavilion’s galleries, this major solo exhibition by Zineb Sedira will be her first in a UK public gallery for 12 years. Working across photography, installation and film, Sedira draws upon her personal history and close connection to Algeria, France and the UK to explore ideas of identity, mobility, gender, environment and collective memory. Throughout her career, Sedira has become a leading voice in addressing the question of what it means to live between different cultures, often bringing together autobiographical narration, fiction and documentary genres. This exhibition will focus on the artist’s ongoing investigation into the conditions of transnational trade and migrant consciousness in a post-colonial context, within which the sea is a recurring motif.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the De La Warr Pavilion and Dundee Contemporary Arts.

Further details of the De La Warr Pavilion’s exhibitions programme can be found at dlwp.com/exhibitions.

Our exhibitions are accompanied by an expansive engagement programme, including tours, events, and workshops for all ages. They offer opportunities to develop connections, curiosity, skills, understanding and creative potential. Please visit dlwp.com/learning for more information.