Whitechapel Gallery Forthcoming Exhibitions

Whitechapel Art Gallery

2009-09-29

September 2009 - June 2010

SOPHIE CALLE: Talking to Strangers
The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first UK retrospective of leading French contemporary artist Sophie Calle. Sophie Calle’s work involves encounters with strangers that are both deeply personal and revealing of broader social issues.  Placing trust in individuals, her artistic social experiments explore identity, the connections between individuals and the boundaries between the public and private self.  Images and texts document the performative process, and her work creates an unsettling intimacy but a positive outlook.  This major exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery brings together 12 key works to survey Sophie Calle’s career from the late 1970s to the present day.
16 October – 3 January 2010
Free admission

BRITISH COUNCIL COLLECTION: My Yard
Artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane curate the third selection of works from the British Council Collection.  Their well-known preoccupation with popular culture trickles through their choices, which focus largely on a view of gritty urban Britain enlivened by quirky touches.  My Yard explores Britain’s industrial history and urban realities as seen by artists throughout the 20th century. Works include Edward Wadsworth’s  drawings of Midlands slag heaps, and a particularly fine painting by L.S. Lowry, Industrial City, l948, of his native Manchester. The Boyle Family find unexpected beauty in the built environment, while John Davies explores urban archaeologies in his photographic studies of Sheffield and Stockport. The folly of utopian town planning is parodied in Paul Noble’s fantastical city drawings.
2 October–6 December 2009
Free admission

THE BRITISH PAVILION AT THE VENICE BIENNALE
The Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition space dedicated to archive displays presents a selection of material from the British Council’s archives to bring to life the history of the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale from 1938 to today. The Venice Biennale provides a barometer for contemporary art worldwide.  Its history of nationalism, protest and war is closely intertwined with the wider political and ideological struggles of twentieth century Europe right back to the exhibition’s foundation in 1895 as the world’s first regular international exhibition of contemporary art.
26 September–13 December 2009
Free admission

THE BLOOMBERG COMMISSION: Goshka Macuga
London-based Polish artist Goshka Macuga’s new site specific artwork focuses on a key moment in the history of the Whitechapel Gallery: the presentation of Picasso’s Guernica in 1939. Forming the centrepiece is a life-size tapestry of Guernica, commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in 1955, and created, in collaboration with Picasso. In 1985, the Rockefeller Estate lent the tapestry to the United Nations Headquarters in New York, to offer a deterrent to war.
Supported by: Bloomberg
Until 18 April 2010
Free admission

Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, E1 7QX

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