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Hew Locke | For Those in Peril on the Sea

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Hew Locke | For Those in Peril on the Sea

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This is a public sculpture depicting a magnificent ship adorned with various colourful flags and emblems. This work explores the themes of migration and exile, particularly for those unfortunate enough to have suffered disaster at sea. The flags and symbols in the work represent different cultural and religious backgrounds, reflecting the theme of cross-culturalism.

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Yinka Shonibare is a British-Nigerian contemporary artist who is best known for his exploration of cultural identity, colonialism, and postcolonialism through his artwork. He was born in London in 1962 and grew up in Nigeria, where he lived until he was 17. He then returned to London to study art, first at Byam Shaw School of Art (now part of Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design) and later at Goldsmiths College, where he earned his MFA.

Shonibare's work often features African wax print fabric, which he uses as a symbol of both African identity and the legacy of colonialism. His sculptures, installations, and paintings often explore the intersections of race, class, and gender, and challenge viewers to rethink their assumptions about identity and power. Some of his most well-known works include "Nelson's Ship in a Bottle," which was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in London in 2010, and "The Swing (after Fragonard)," a sculpture of a headless woman on a swing that references the French Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Shonibare's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. He has also been awarded numerous prizes and awards for his work, including an MBE in 2004 and an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London in 2010.

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The little gallery that roared | Museums | The Guardian

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Juergen Teller shoots fast. He uses two cameras at a time, loaded with film (he won't go digital), supplied fully primed by an assistant who carries a bag full of them. Holding the cameras in a kind of fan, he alternates between the two, shifting them from one hand to another like a magician shuffling cards. It's partly stagecraft, he explains; a way of hypnotising his subject. And when he decides on a whim to shoot me, I see what he means: it's a pleasant experience, not at all the usual horror of having your picture taken.

Teller's usual milieu is the fashion industry, but none of the people he is photographing today are exactly Kate Moss. They wouldn't mind me saying this: in fact, the Turner prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger makes this joke himself, about himself. On a brilliant day in March, some of the brightest artists at work in Britain today have come to the Whitechapel Gallery to celebrate its imminent reopening - early next month, after a two-year refurbishment and substantial expansion project. For more than 100 years, this gallery has exhibited the giants of modern art and championed the most radical avant-gardes; it has also launched and supported the careers of countless artists - among them Richard Hamilton, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Gilbert and George, and Bridget Riley. Wallinger, currently working on his colossal white horse for Ebbsfleet, had a 2001 show here that helped establish his reputation as a conceptual artist of rare personality and intelligence. Cornelia Parker's surrealist meditations on ordinary things and their alchemical transformation have been advanced by two exhibitions here; Michael Craig-Martin, who taught the Hirst generation while a tutor at Goldsmiths, has had a solo show here, curated another, and has now created an exhibition of works from the British Council collection for the reopening. For these artists and others, it is a favourite gallery: for the many who work in the East End. It is as Wallinger says, "an embracing sort of place". "It's the great East End outpost," is how Cornelia Parker puts it.

The Whitechapel sits squarely on the street, in the thick of things, in a part of London that looks as if it will never be gentrified. It is still the only major art museum I know that nuzzles a KFC on one side and a gaming arcade on the other. It is by no means the most striking building in the area; that would be the East London Mosque, its lofty entrance, decorated with geometric tiles, looking out over the market stalls that serve the area's Bangladeshi community. When the gallery opened its doors in 1901, less than two decades after Jack the Ripper made Whitechapel infamous, this area was a byword for poverty and human dereliction. The Whitechapel's roots lie in Victorian philanthropy: its original audience was intended to be the local poor and marginalised. So how did a gallery built to educate the East End become a leading centre of contemporary art? And where does the Whitechapel's glamorous rebuild leave its original ideals?

Surprises lie in store when you enter the new-old gallery behind its quiet Arts and Crafts facade. The elegant entrance lobby leads into the big central gallery and upstairs spaces (these are familiar); but also to a completely new ground floor gallery, a restaurant, another new gallery dedicated to displaying collections, a gallery for the display of archive materials, as well as working spaces for artists and schools. It is bigger and more complex in feel, a museum rather than an exhibition space.

This tranformation is a Tardis-like feat, and not just because the Whitechapel is bigger on the inside than on the outside. You could say that it has grown in time as well as space, that it now embraces its history more fully. I stand with Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick in a rectangular hall that features exposed Victorian brickwork, Victorian pillars, and a skewed new concrete skylight that she criticises as "too baroque". She points up at an ancient crooked edifice, overshadowing the skylight. That's a derelict, uninhabited building, she says, but they weren't allowed to demolish it to improve the light. Its bizarrely tall Georgian chimneys tower overhead.

Constrained by space, ensnared in the fabric of Whitechapel, the gallery has expanded by annexing a neighbour that is closely related to it, but slightly older. The Whitechapel Public Library surrounds Aldgate East tube station with a brick Victorian front that evokes a Tudor mansion. An inscription inside records the laying of a memorial stone for the Whitechapel Free Library and Museum on 27 July 1891. This library, Blazwick says, was once "the university of the ghetto". At the turn of the 20th century, Whitechapel was the new home of Jewish refugees from pogroms in eastern Europe. The library, she tells me, once housed Europe's largest collection of books in Yiddish. Today it is gone - the library has moved down the road to a blue-and-green glass building called the Idea Store.

But the death of a library is the rebirth of a museum. The gallery has expanded into the old library building; in the big space where we're standing, the architects have made its London stock bricks visible. As you explore the other rooms, their former use quietly haunts the modern whiteness. There is, in short, a library feeling to the new Whitechapel.

In the 1950s and 1960s, under its renowned director Bryan Robertson, the Whitechapel became a byword for adventurousness. Contemporary art in those days meant action paintings, pop collages, Americana. The very marginality of the Whitechapel freed it to experiment: far from the Royal Academy, which dominated art in the West End of London, Robertson was able to bring in artists who never got a look-in with the British establishment. In 1958, Jackson Pollock had a show here; in 1961, so did Mark Rothko. These shows, some say, were encouraged by the CIA to promote America's cause in the cold war. Whatever the truth of this claim, they introduced a new kind of art to Britain. This was the moment when the big, open style of abstract expressionism - so differently but brilliantly manifested by Pollock and Rothko - made the rangy, liberating quality of American art deeply attractive.

In the 60s, British art seemed to take off, largely by embracing the American ideas the Whitechapel had promoted. The idea of pop art was born here when Richard Hamilton made a collaged poster featuring the word POP for the 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrow. Another great British pop artist, David Hockney, had his first solo show here; and a few years later, East End conceptual provocateurs Gilbert and George followed. Under Robertson, the Whitechapel earned a reputation for championing the new that it has never lost. In the 1980s, the gallery's then director Nicholas Serota brought artists such as Cy Twombly and Julian Schnabel to the East End. It was while at the Whitechapel that Serota revealed the qualities of alertness to the new, combined with an institutional authority, that would enable him to revolutionise the Tate. After he moved on, director Catherine Lampert continued the Whitechapel's adventures with shows by Wallinger, Gary Hume, and the group show Protest and Survive, which argued for a more political approach to art.

The artists here at the gallery with me today, having their portraits taken by Teller, all got early inspiration and encouragement here. "The first time I felt like a serious artist," Wallinger says, "was getting a work into the Whitechapel Open [the gallery's free submission exhibition for East End artists]." This would have been in 1982 or 3, when he cycled from London to Florence and was so moved by Botticelli's Primavera in the Uffizi that he made a work of art about it.

Cornelia Parker, creator of the Tate's exploding shed, says she was regularly rejected by the Whitechapel Open. She lived in a big community of artists in Leytonstone at the time, and remembers how Serota's exhibition of Julian Schnabel here "blew my mind - so exuberant". I can see her point; I can see why the revelation of cocksure artists like Schnabel must have been a breath of fresh air at a time when British art was tending toward the cautious and uptight. Parker still lives in the East End, near the top of Brick Lane.

In the late 60s Bridget Riley spearheaded a movement to find cheap industrial spaces for artists in east London, which led to thousands of people working and living around here. Today, even with the Olympics threatening to smarten parts of it up, you are far more like to meet an artist in Hackney than you are in Montmartre. Parker speaks fondly of finding stuff for her art in Brick Lane and Petticoat Lane markets. When she goes out into the country, she says, her husband gets hayfever. He never gets it around here; there aren't enough trees. Rachel Whiteread tells me that after a while she goes mad in the country. She has to get home to the East End.

As he walks with Juergen Teller to be photographed in the gallery where he has curated an exhibition of works from the British Council collection, Michael Craig-Martin confides that his recent commercial exhibition at the Gagosian sold brilliantly. If it was on now, he says, he wouldn't sell a thing. What will a declining art market mean for a young artist such as Goshka Macuga? Shortlisted for last year's Turner prize, Macuga has been commissioned to create the first work for the new project space. Her installation revisits the Whitechapel's history: amazingly, Picasso's Guernica was shown here in 1939, and Macuga has borrowed a celebrated tapestry copy of the painting from the UN.

Her art is all about introspective reworkings of cultural history: not the kind of art that usually finds a high profile, yet the ebulliance of the art market in recent years has sustained a Goshka Macuga as easily as it has a Banksy.

Art fairs and dealers are suddenly a lot less ebullient. This could be a good thing for public galleries. In the early 1990s, when British art suddently started to interest a wider world, it was sustained mainly by public spaces, above all the Tate, where Serota went from the Whitechapel. The reborn Whitechapel could be not just a support for artists in troubled times, but a strong public platform to fly the flag of the new.

Talking to Whiteread, I tell her about my own first memory of the gallery. On a chilly Saturday in 1993 I came here to see Lucian Freud's portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery in what was possibly his most important exhibition in this country. The grandeur of these great paintings was unforgettable in the pale Whitechapel light.

From there, I walked on to see Whiteread's House, probably about a week before the demolition of this Turner prize-winning masterpiece of modern sculpture, a haunting cast of the interior of an East End house. "That sounds like a good art day," says Whiteread.

As we leave the gallery, rain clouds have turned Whitechapel High Street dark. "It's still pretty unforgiving," Whiteread says of the gallery's immediate neighbourhood. But where, exactly, is forgiving? Walking west, the towers of the City loom above us: junk citadels, worthless palaces. The Whitechapel tapped its corporate donors just in time. In this new age, good public art galleries have a renewed vocation. Artists will need supportive environments more than ever, and modern art itself will need powerful champions in a Britain likely to revert to conservatism with both a small and a large C.

Anyway, art isn't everything. The Whitechapel is still surrounded by poverty, and its original, philanthropic purpose remains as urgent as ever. I've left the Whitechapel's most beautiful new space until last. Right at the top of the building, a glass-walled studio enjoys an astonishing view over the neighbourhood, including Hawksmoor's Christ Church and Toynbee Hall. I walked in expecting this to be the swanky new restaurant, but it turns out to be the education room, dedicated to teaching school children about contemporary art. The best view has been kept for them.

The Whitechapel Gallery reopens on 5 April

When I started at the Whitechapel, I was just 30. Bryan Robertson had run it brilliantly in the 1950s and 60s but after that it had had three directors in eight years, which demonstrated some of the problems it faced. In 1968, the Hayward Gallery opened on the Southbank and the ICA arrived in the Mall. In 1969, the Tate Gallery began a much more adventurous programme and then, in 1970, the Serpentine appeared. Suddenly, the Whitechapel had a lot of competition and looked very far from the centre of London - and it had a poor relationship with its local community. What I wanted to do was try to reinstate it as a place that could show international and British modern art, and reconnect it to its immediate locale. The first appointment I made was someone to work on community projects, and we started an artist in residence programme in local schools.

Shortly after I arrived, in the summer of 1976, there were terrible summer storms. One day I went into the dilapidated gallery to find water fountaining out of the walls - the drains were behind the walls, which were rotten. So the first thing we had to do was close for a couple of months and sort out the gutters. When we reopened in January 1977, it was with a Richard Long exhibition and a show by Dutch conceptualist Stanley Brouwn - pretty uncompromising.

Then the following year, there was Carl Andre. The Tate had been vilified for showing his bricks and were not exhibiting his work, so I felt it was important to redress the balance. We continued with an Eva Hesse show in 1979, and in 1980 an exhibition of Max Beckmann's triptychs, which had never been seen together before. Internationally, these shows put us back on the map; but in London, there was often a hostile reception. It was sometimes pretty lonely.

Over the following years we showed, among others, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz - people whose work just simply hadn't been seen in this country, even in commercial galleries. There were exhibitions by Cy Twombly and Howard Hodgkin and forgotten figures such as Frida Kahlo or Victor Willing; and a two-part show of British sculpture made with Sandy Nairne, now the director of the National Portrait Gallery. In 1985, we undertook a serious renovation of the building.

In those days, the art world was much smaller; there was a small group of passionate people committed to showing new art. It was only in the mid-1980s that the papers began to publish huge Saturday editions with art previews. Before that, we had to rely on reviews on Radio 3. There were a few critics writing well for the papers - such as Richard Cork, Waldemar Januszczak and Caroline Tisdall. There was in general a faint hostility to showing international art, and very few people in the British art world travelled abroad as a matter of course. The Venice Biennale certainly wasn't the jamboree it has become. But I learned that you had to connect to Europe and America, or else you would end up being parochial. The other great lesson was that things can only be achieved if you have a good team around you - and I had a wonderful team who have all gone on to other achievements.

The Whitechapel is an almost perfectly sized gallery; a series of very beautiful spaces for working with artists, showing art and bringing new ideas into the world. It can be fleet-of-foot and non-bureaucratic. Best of all, you can walk into it off the street. I love it, and I miss it.

Nicholas Serota was talking to Charlotte Higgins

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Jonathan Jones on the eagerly awaited reopening of the Whitechapel gallery

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Juergen Teller shoots fast. He uses two cameras at a time, loaded with film (he won't go digital), supplied fully primed by an assistant who carries a bag full of them. Holding the cameras in a kind of fan, he alternates between the two, shifting them from one hand to another like a magician shuffling cards.

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https://shirazbayjoo.com/21st-biennale-of-sydney

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1)write some thoughts about east london and migration
do some reference

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when we went to Whitechapel gallery in the week we noticed the audience average age was much above the 35years old. We think therefore that the gallery should engage more with a younger audience, gen z, and we are willing to create a strategy or long term marketing plan which should help them to get closer to that age band. we have decided to do this because it will help give more space and participation for younger generations which usually do not want or are shy or lazy to be active participants, but also because the future is ours and in our hands. we need to do what our older generations did not manage to do and need to have more responsibility socially, therefore engage more in public and private spaces with older generations.  We think it will be very fruitful for the gallery in terms of quality of the arts and quality of intellectual and political communication. But also for the gallery to think with a younger mindset which by adapting to gen z trends can be more impactful internationally on social networks. 

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when we went to Whitechapel gallery in the week we noticed the audience average age was much above the 35years old. We think therefore that the gallery should engage more with a younger audience, gen z, and we are willing to create a strategy or long term marketing plan which should help them to get closer to that age band. we have decided to do this because it will help give more space and participation for younger generations which usually do not want or are shy or lazy to be active participants, but also because the future is ours and in our hands. we need to do what our older generations did not manage to do and need to have more responsibility socially, therefore engage more in public and private spaces with older generations.  We think it will be very fruitful for the gallery in terms of quality of the arts and quality of intellectual and political communication. But also for the gallery to think with a younger mindset which by adapting to gen z trends can be more impactful internationally on social networks. 

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artwork:Mother, Daughter and I (triptych

https://mennour.com/artists/zineb-sedira?gclid=CjwKCAjw_MqgBhAGEiwAnYOAel3VuGNaehGm4x2i2YI8VK5t31K6JFuIwOEJo-JMQAIcjlZCzKLLBxoC23gQAvD_BwE

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Born in 1963 in Paris (France), ZINEB SEDIRA lives in London (United Kingdom) and works between Algiers (Algeria), Paris and London. Over the fifteen years of her practice, Sedira has enriched the debate around the concepts of modernism, modernity …

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How many artists are normally required for a group exhibition

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https://www.artsy.net/artist/hassan-hajjaj