The Southbank Centre announces that the Hayward Gallery will reopen on 19 May, with two much-anticipated, solo exhibitions by Matthew Barney and Igshaan Adams.
The announcement comes as a new slate of events for Inside Out, an online season of music and literature are released. This next instalment of the popular digital series will see the Southbank Centre’s Resident Orchestras performing at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, marking the first time the much-loved venue has been open since it closed last March due to Covid-19.
The orchestras are joined by a roster of leading international artists, including conductors Ben Gernon, Enrique Mazzola, Fabien Gabel, Robin Ticciati, Rory MacDonald, Ryan Bancroft and Sir Mark Elder and soloists Alexandra Dariescu, Denis Kozhukhin, Paul Lewis, Pavel Kolesnikov and Steven Isserlis.
A further series of Inside Out events will be announced in the coming weeks. The Southbank Centre’s reopening plans will then be announced in due course, subject to government guidance.
Gillian Moore CBE, Director of Music and Performing Arts, Southbank Centre, says: “We’re making a very warm welcome back to our orchestral partners this Spring for our ongoing Inside Out series. It’s going to be wonderful to see them back in the Southbank Centre doing what they do best, performing much-loved music with world-class conductors and soloists. We know these events will continue to bring a little bit of light into our homes as we look forward to reopening our shared spaces later this year.”
HAYWARD GALLERY:
Matthew Barney: Redoubt
19 May – 25 July 2021
From 19 May through 25 July 2021 the Hayward Gallery presents Matthew Barney: Redoubt, an exhibition of the renowned artist and filmmaker’s latest body of work. The exhibition, the artist’s first major museum show in the UK in over a decade, presents a group of monumental sculptures, and more than forty engravings and electroplated copper plates. Also included is the UK premiere of Barney’s new eponymous film, a ‘breathtakingly beautiful’ chronicle that explores the complex relationships between humans, and the natural world. Set in the sublime wintry landscape of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountain range, the feature-length film intertwines themes of artistic creation in a contemporary reworking of the classical myth of Diana and Actaeon.
Redoubt presents a major new direction in Barney’s practice, and advances his notable shift in materials over the past decade, from the plastic and petroleum jelly of his earlier works to the cast metals that figured prominently in River of Fundament, 2014. With Redoubt, Barney combines traditional casting methods and new digital technologies in an unprecedented way to create artworks of formal and material complexity as well as narrative density. The four large-scale sculptures in the exhibition derive from trees harvested from a burned forest in the Sawtooth Mountains. Formed out of molten copper and brass, the unique casts incorporate enlarged militarised elements, giving the sculptures a hybridised aesthetic that is both imposing and intricate.
Matthew Barney: Redoubt was originally organised by the Yale University Art Gallery.
Igshaan Adams: Kicking Dust
19 May – 25 July 2021
In May 2021, the Hayward Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in the UK of South African artist Igshaan Adams (b. 1982). The 2018 winner of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award, Igshaan Adams lives and works in Cape Town. The artist’s cross-disciplinary practice combines aspects of weaving, sculpture and installation whilst exploring concerns related to race, religion and sexuality.
The exhibition consists largely of new work produced during an artist residency Adams undertook at the A4 Foundation in Cape Town and on the occasion of the show. Presented as a single immersive environment with suspended sculptures, large-scale floor based weavings and tapestries hung on the wall, the installation responds to Hayward’s iconic Brutalist gallery space. Each work, and the exhibition as a whole, is composed of multiple patterns that explore the potential of woven material to reflect not only the multiplicities of Adams’ own identity but of broader cultural interchange.
RESIDENT ORCHESTRAS:
The London Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, and London Sinfonietta return to the Southbank Centre in March and April for streamed concerts featuring world-renowned conductors and soloists, as well as programming for young people. The events announced today will run to 28 April, with subsequent digital programming from 28 April onwards to be announced in due course. Tickets will be available to the general public from 2pm on Friday 5 March.
The London Philharmonic Orchestra presents six concerts filmed by Intersection (formerly Silent Studios) which will be available for audiences to watch for free on Marquee.tv from 24 March. The concerts will be streamed every Wednesday at 8pm from 24 March and will feature conductors Enrique Mazzola, Robin Ticciati and Sir Mark Elder, as well as soloists Steven Isserlis, Denis Kozhukhin and Alexandra Dariescu. Programme details for later concerts will soon be revealed but will include two of the Orchestra’s titled conductors Karina Canellakis and Vladimir Jurowski, who conducts his final concerts at the Royal Festival Hall before stepping into the Conductor Emeritus role.
Tickets will be free for the first seven days after broadcast and concerts will be captured before their premiere date.
The Philharmonia Orchestra presents two global streams to be presented on the orchestra’s own dedicated channel. On Thursday 25 March, the Philharmonia will be joined by conductor Ryan Bancroft and pianist Paul Lewis for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. On Thursday 1 April, Rory MacDonald will then lead the orchestra for a programme of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, with Pavel Kolesnikov performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
Tickets start at £10 and concerts will be captured before their premiere date.
The London Sinfonietta’s ‘Sound Out Online’ is the orchestra’s annual concert for children and young people and goes online for the first time to bring pupils closer to iconic contemporary music from the past century (22 March). As part of the orchestra’s Composition Challenges scheme, the concert features new works submitted by young people, as the London Sinfonietta continues to inspire a new generation of composers to get creative with classical music.
This event is free and will be streamed live on YouTube, exclusively for the Southbank Centre on Monday 22 March from 2 – 2.50pm. It is designed for Key Stage 2.
Previously announced online music and literature events as part of Inside Out include Skin (4 Mar), Black Country, New Road (6 Mar), London Contemporary Orchestra (19 Mar), Bell Orchestre (13 Mar), Hanif Abdurraquib (25 Mar), Out-Spoken (28 Mar), Kazuo and Naomi Ishiguro (5 Apr), Olivia Laing (30 Apr) and Jhumpa Lahiri (6 May). Tickets are onsale.
Elsewhere at the Southbank Centre:
WINTER LIGHT
Winter Light (extended until 28 March) is a free open-air exhibition that enlivens the site’s iconic buildings and the Riverside Walk with luminous, playful and thought-provoking artworks during the darkest months of the year. Featuring a range of leading international artists, Winter Light includes artworks, new commissions and a series of poems that make ingenious use of light, colour and animation whilst touching on diverse concerns.
At a time when we view so much of the world through digital screens, the artists in this exhibition celebrate how the medium of light can transform our physical spaces. Their artworks also explore ideas about nature, politics and society, gender, aesthetics and the act of looking. Winter Light includes artworks by artists including: Simeon Barclay, David Batchelor, James Clar, Shezad Dawood, Kota Ezawa, Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Suzie Larke, Tala Madani, Tatsuo Miyajima, Louiza Ntourou, Katie Paterson, Jini Reddy, Tavares Strachan, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Emma Talbot and Toby Ziegler.
IMAGINE A STORY
Coinciding with World Book Day, the Southbank Centre is inviting 40 primary schools to take part in this year’s creative writing project Imagine a Story, giving young children the chance to become published authors. Children’s author Zanib Mian and illustrator Selom Sunu are collaborating on the project, which is open to classes of Key Stage 2 children (years 3 – 6), with online applications closing Sunday 14 March.
In this project inspired by a ‘game of consequences’ each school group writes one segment of a creative story based on a framework devised by Zanib Mian (Planet Omar: Operation Kind – published for World Book Day 2021; Planet Omar: Incredible Rescue Mission; Planet Omar: Unexpected Super Spy), the author of brilliant and diverse children’s fiction, who will inspire them to develop their collaborative work in classrooms to support their development and personal wellbeing.
These chapters will then be combined into a collection of short stories and professionally published by the Southbank Centre, with illustrations by Selom Sunu (Ghost; Patina; Sunny; Lu; Look Both Ways) Zanib Mian and Selom Sunu will read the final stories which will be live-streamed to participating primary school classrooms in July and each child will receive a copy of the published book.
In addition, the Southbank Centre’s nationwide participation programme, Art by Post has been shortlisted for "Award for the Best Larger Social Prescribing Project" as part of the Social Prescribing Network Awards. The ceremony is on 4 March with winners to be announced from 3.30 – 5pm.
