In 2024, Serpentine presents major solo exhibitions by artists across generations who continue to set the political agenda and looks to the future with explorations of art and activism in the age of advanced technologies and environmental emergency. Highlights will include solo exhibitions from Barbara Kruger, Judy Chicago, Lauren Halsey and Yinka Shonibare CBE.
Coming in 2024
In February 2024, Serpentine will present a solo show of recent works by American artist Barbara Kruger (b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, USA). The exhibition will feature a unique selection of site-specific installations covering the walls and floor of the gallery spaces, moving image works and multiple soundscapes. It will be the artist’s first institutional show in London in over 20 years, following the presentation at South London Gallery in 2001 and a return to Serpentine following her participation in the gallery’s 1994 group show Wall to Wall.
Opening in February 2024, Serpentine will present a solo exhibition by Refik Anadol, an internationally renowned artist, director and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. Known for his ground-breaking media works and public installations, Anadol has created digital artworks that unfold in real time, continuously generating new and otherworldly forms that envelop viewers in a large-scale installation.
From April 2024, Serpentine will present a solo exhibition of works by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA at Serpentine South. Shonibare’s interdisciplinary practice explores cultural identity and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. Through his signature use of ‘African’ batik fabric, Shonibare comments on the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe. The exhibition will include installations of sculptures, pictorial quilts and woodcuts, presenting his explorations on the ongoing effects of boundaries ‘whether psychological, physical or geographical’. Shonibare’s most recent body of works explores sites of refuge, debates about statues and their place in our cities, and the European legacy of war and consequential attempts at peace.
In Summer 2024, Serpentine will present an exhibition of trailblazing artist, author, educator and feminist icon Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Chicago, USA; lives and works in New Mexico, USA). Revelations will be Chicago’s first solo presentation in a major London institution. One of the most provocative and influential artists working today, Chicago came to prominence in the late 1960s when she challenged the male-dominated landscape of the art world by making work that was boldly from a woman’s perspective.
Serpentine is delighted to announce that Seoul-based Korean architect Minsuk Cho and his firm Mass Studies have been selected to design the 23rd Pavilion. Mass Studies’ Pavilion will be unveiled at Serpentine South on 5th June 2024 with Goldman Sachs supporting the annual project for the 10th consecutive year.
In July 2024, the ten-year anniversary of the Extinction Marathon, the Infinite Ecologies Marathon will take place as a mid-summer festival across Serpentine sites, including The Magazine restaurant and the Serpentine Pavilion 2024.
This Marathon will convene participants across the arts, sciences, activism, and humanities. Concerned with the multiplicity and interdependencies of life-forms that constitute this Earth, the Infinite Ecologies Marathon proposes practical actions, stories, imaginaries, futures, and cosmologies rooted in the principles of environmental interconnection, attunement and responsibility. The Infinite Ecologies Marathon points to interconnected abundance and sensual complexity, while acknowledging the vastly different lived realities of climate breakdown. While unfathomably global, the experience of it is as varied as there are living beings on this planet.
In Autumn 2024, Serpentine South will present the first solo exhibition in the UK of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Halsey (b. 1987). Halsey’s wide-ranging practice is deeply rooted in the neighbourhood of South Central Los Angeles in which her family have lived for generations.
Making immersive installations and stand-alone objects, Halsey archives and remixes the changing signs and symbols populating her environment, offering a celebration of the community’s vitality and a creative form of resistance to its growing gentrification.
Berlin-based artists and technologists Holly Herndon (USA – named by TIME magazine among the 100 most influential people in AI) and Mat Dryhurst (UK) will present an exhibition at Serpentine North as part of a year-long research project with the Arts Technologies team exploring the ‘dark corridors of what it means to be an artist in the AI age’ (Herndon & Dryhurst).
Art in the Park
Open until 30 September 2024 and in partnership with the Maria Lassnig Foundation, Serpentine presents a public art mural by the late Ghanaian painter, printmaker, independent art historian, and curator Atta Kwami (1956 – 2021).
Pollinator Pathmaker is an ongoing living sculpture made of plants. Unlike most gardens, this one is designed to prioritise the needs of endangered pollinating insects, rather than to please humans. For her contribution to Back to Earth in 2022, artist Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has created an edition of Pollinator Pathmaker which has been planted near Serpentine in Kensington Gardens. The work is laid out in eleven beds along the length of North Flower Walk, which is located next to Lancaster Gate.