Summer Programme 2022

3pm

Rebecca Lewin, Curator, Exhibitions & Design leads a tour of the Back to Earth exhibition at Serpentine North.

Part of an ongoing project that began at Serpentine in 2020, the Back to Earth exhibition invites artistic responses to the climate emergency. It brings together different kinds of research, materials and approaches from around the planet to offer insights into artists’ concerns, ideas and hopes for the future.

More information here.

This is the UK premiere of the award-winning opera performance Sun & Sea by visual artist and composer Lina Lapelytė, writer and poet Vaiva Grainytė and film / theatre director Rugilė Barzdžiukaite, curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, Founder of Serpentine’s General Ecology programme. Hosted at The Albany, Lewisham, London, from 23 June to 10 July, the show is co-presented by LIFT, the Albany and Serpentine as part of LIFT 2022, Back to Earth and We Are Lewisham.

More information and booking here.

As part of the Sun & Sea live programme (23 June – 10 July 2022), Scorching Suns, Rising Seas, a public engagement programme deepening themes of environmental justice for the show, will include free film screenings taking place at The Albany, Lewisham, as well as a public symposium at Serpentine on Saturday 9 July.

More information and booking here.

1pm – 10pm

Concluding Scorching Suns, Rising Seas, a public gathering convening artists, filmmakers, policymakers, scientists and writers to engage with issues around environmental justice on diverse scales will take centre stage.

Participants will include activist Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, climate scientist Tim Lenton, novelist Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Stop Ecocide co-founder Jojo Mehta, musical artist Love Ssega, legal practitioner Philippe Sands, photographer Sarah Stirk, jazz educators Tomorrow’s Warriors, and others to be announced. It is curated by Radical Ecology, in partnership with LIFT 2022, Serpentine’s Back to Earth project, We Are Lewisham, University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter Arts & Culture, University College London’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race & Racialisation, Open Society Foundations, Lewisham Migrants & Refugee Network and UCL Anthropocene.

More information and booking here.

11am – 6pm

A Back to Earth LIVE programme exploring transformation, queerness, the wild, the natural and the unnatural, as well as, decolonial, Indigenous and submerged perspectives.

Queer Earth and Liquid Matters brings together artists, writers, filmmakers, sound and architecture practitioners to explore decolonial and queer ecologies. Highlighting different voices and experiences of the climate emergency, the programme aims to complicate the binaries of Western knowledge often encountered in the environmental discourse. Specifically, Queer Earth and Liquid Matters sheds light on land and water struggles, foregrounds queer/trans Indigenous embodiment in the Global South and around the world. It explores visions and experiences of apocalypse and amplifies Indigenous refusal and outrage at the consequences of extractive capitalism.

The two-day programme features talks, performances, films, poetry and more. Participants include Xavi Aguirre, Seba Calfuqueo, Adham Faramawy, Ash Fure, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Ashley Joiner, Jacob V Joyce and Rudy Loewe, Jack Halberstam, Victoria Hunt, Bhanu Kapil, Juan Francisco Salazar, P. Staff, Bones Tan Jones, and multidisciplinary dance theatre company Wringing Metamorphosis.

Curated by Macarena Gómez-Barris, Jack Halberstam and Kostas Stasinopoulos.

Presented in collaboration with Stone Nest and Queercircle.

More information and booking here.

7pm

Join us for the international premiere of Manthia Diawara’s film, A Letter from Yene, commissioned by Serpentine, MUBI and PCAI Polygreen Culture & Art Initiative as part of Back to Earth.

The screening is followed by a conversation between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine. This event is presented in collaboration with Institut français du Royaume-Uni.

More information and booking here.

8pm

This epistolary performance by Himali Singh Soin accompanied by drummer David Soin Tappeser, is part of Singh Soin’s ongoing Back to Earth project commission, Static Range.

Based on a historical spy-story in the Indian Himalayas, Static Range includes interventions by Singh Soin’s friends. The performance-installation forms a landscape of speculations and reflections about nuclear culture, porosity, leakages, toxicity, love, spiritual-scientific entanglements, environmental catastrophe, and post-nation states.

More information here.

3pm

Bones Tan Jones’ Back to Earth commission is dedicated to Fertile Souls, a survival skills-sharing collective founded in 2019 which seeks to queer the idea of what survival could look like to a community of people of colour, queer folks and beings who exist beyond the boundaries of society.

Through workshops such as sound healing, astrology, body healing rituals, instrument-making, vocal resonance, herbal medicine, and more, Fertile Souls shares ways in which we can take healing into our own hands and nurture ourselves within the ever-more dystopian landscape. Bones Tan Jones will present an activation of Fertile Souls that aligns with the pagan wheel of the year, including solstices, equinoxes and all ceremonial dates in between.

More information here.

7pm

Join us for an evening exploring ‘Poetry and Spiritualism’ inside Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibition, Alienarium 5.

Author and lecturer Tatiana Kontou will engage with Gonzalez-Foerster’s immersive and multimedia 360-degree collage, Metapanorama, through a discussion around Victorian spiritualist concerns, psychoanalysis, and 19th century optical toys and modes of display. Kontou’s presentation will be accompanied by a reading given by poet and artist Precious Okoyomon.

8pm

Join us for a concert by Exotourisme, the final live programme for Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibition, Alienarium 5.

Exotourisme is a musical, vocal and visual rift in the glittering electro-pop galaxy. The collaborative duo comprising experimental artist and singer Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and musician and experimental artist Julien Perez, have been sending sounds and signals into space since 2018. Shining like a 2000s neon sign in a haunting psychic landscape, Exotourisme is a melancholic and bewitching dream, saturated with cinematographic nostalgia. With their retro-futurist electro melodies, the duo are inspired by films such as Blade Runner and Solaris, as well as 1990s French ‘cold wave’. 

Book here.

2pm

Project Curator Natalia Grabowska and Guest Curator of Pavilion Live Programme Bianca A. Manu lead a tour of Serpentine Pavilion 2022, Black Chapel, designed by Theaster Gates. Together they will speak about the history of the commission, this year’s design, and the live programme conceived for the Pavilion.

More information here.

A ritualistic tea ceremony will be held in the Serpentine Pavilion 2022, Black Chapel, designed by Theaster Gates. This ceremony will be held by Keiko Uchida, a qualified Japanese tea ceremony master who has practised for 25 years. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Uchida comes from a lineage of Kimono specialists and traditional tearoom artisans. Uchida will invite visitors to listen as she orates the history and philosophy of Japanese tea culture that initially developed as a Zen ritual in the 15th century. Visitors can enjoy and engage their full senses as she performs the traditional meditative ritual whilst offering everyone a cup of matcha tea.

More information and booking here.

6.30pm – 8.30pm

Multi-hyphenate musician Moses Boyd will bring his progressive Jazz sound to Serpentine. Hailed as one of the hottest talents of contemporary British Jazz, Boyd will take centre stage offering an experimental solo drum set inspired by his debut album, Dark Matter.

3pm – 4.30pm

The Choir of the London Oratory will hallow the chapel with select music from major Roman Catholic liturgies. Internationally renowned as leading exponents of music from the Latin tradition, the Choir of the London Oratory will perform an eclectic tribute, drawn from Gregorian chant and classical polyphony for feasts throughout the year, ranging from deep meditation to brilliant jubilation, and covering a millennium of creativity in sacred music.

More information here.

2pm

South London based community pottery studio Mud Gang Pottery CIC will offer workshops to children, families and anyone excited to experiment with clay.

Visitors will learn about the foundation of creating ceramics, make something unique and learn about the clay recycling process. In recognition of the Black Chapel’s inspiration from kilns in Stoke-on-Trent, the Pavilion will present an afternoon of accessible pottery in an engaging and relaxed atmosphere. It will also celebrate the artist and ceramist Theaster Gates’ approach to clay; ‘it’s not really about the material, it is about our capacity to shape things’. Open to all ages and abilities. Clay and tools will be provided for everyone to experiment.

Book here.

Assistant Curator Chris Bayley leads a tour of Serpentine Pavilion 2022 Black Chapel designed by Theaster Gates.

BSL interpretation is available on request for all our Saturday Talks. No booking required.

Read more here.

6.30pm

Two-time GRAMMY award-winning singer and songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae will perform at sunset under the Serpentine Pavilion 2022 for an acoustic performance of selected works.

The performance will feature Rae’s dulcet tones accompanying the guitar as she sings a set from her illustrious discography to an intimate audience. Guests will witness a beautiful bearing of the soul as Rae shares her life through candid chronicles centred on love, heartbreak, vulnerability and hope. The revered musician and luminescent talent will be performing works in honour of Black Chapel.

To complete Serpentine’s Summer Programme 2022, artist and Serpentine Pavilion 2022 designer Theaster Gates will bring his monastic musical order, The Black Monks, to Britain to testify their sound. Soulful sonic experiments will combine southern musical traditions, jazz, blues and more.

Founded in 2009, The Black Monks ‘simultaneously achieve holiness and humanness, restraint and ecstasy’. The collective is a meditation on sound, harmonising to create something familiar yet refreshing. Audiences will experience their performance in wonder as musical fellowship ascends through the verticality of the Serpentine Pavilion roof, and opens out to the sky, taking passage through the central oculus designed by Gates.

8pm

Serpentine is pleased to present an evening of poetry with Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Linton Kwesi Johnson (b. 1952 Clarendon Parish, Jamaica) is a poet, musician, and activist. Johnson’s poems first appeared in the journal Race Today in 1974, and his first LP was released by Virgin Records in 1978. Born in Jamaica, Johnson moved to London in 1963, attended Tulse Hill secondary school and later studied Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, where his personal papers are currently held in their archive. While still in school he was an active member in the Black Panther Party.

8pm

Serpentine is pleased to present a new commission by Josiane M.H. Pozi (b. 1998, London, UK).  

Josiane M.H. Pozi is an artist and filmmaker. Over the past year, her work has appeared at  Somerset House, London; Kunsthaus Glarus; Stadtgalerie Bern; and The Shed, New York. She previously performed Lifetime in collaboration with musician Klein for Serpentine Park Nights 2019, and her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Carlos/Ishikawa, London, and Buchholz Galerie, Berlin. Pozi has made music videos, concert visuals and footage for other projects by musicians including Klein, Moses Boyd, Jawnino, and Four Tet. Pozi lives and works in London.

Book here.

8pm

Serpentine is pleased to present an evening of music and performance from Standing on the Corner.

Standing on the Corner is an earth-based Art Ensemble founded in 2016 by Shamel Cee Mystery, AKA Gio Escobar. Inspired by, made for and consisting of all people of the African diaspora, Standing on the Corner thrives in fugitivity: they can appear on any night as the beat of one drum, as an orchestra of 30, or as a ghost entirely, but always on the run. The ensemble produces musical, visual and experiential works that equate hyper-local incidence to cosmological wisdom. Visiting sites of emotional resonance under the weight of subjective histories and traumas, the Art Ensemble seeks to uncover the mysteries and the ghosts of hidden truths through focused interpretation. In 2016, they released their eponymous first album, followed by Red Burns in 2017. They have collaborated with musicians such as MIKE (2017, 2018), Earl Sweatshirt (2018), Solange (2019), and Danny Brown (2021). 

The Synthetic Ecologies Lab brings together artistic and scientific communities into experimental exchange through its latest project: Compendium.

It is a guide in the exploration of the parallels between culture, ecology and life science through the lens of seasonal thematic motifs. Led by a Guest Curator and the Guild, – a group of contributing thought leaders from diverse fields, – Compendium is an evolving archive of sketches, notes and conversations that explore histories of human knowledge and the invisible scales of life that govern not only our kitchens, but also our contemporary science, culture and technology.

Find out more here.

Join Principal Investigator of the Blockchain Lab Ruth Catlow and writer Penny Rafferty – editors of the new book, Radical Friends – in exploring Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs or technology enabled member-owned communities without centralised leadership) and their potential in the arts. Select readings from the text will be presented by editors Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, followed by contributors including Sam Spike, Kei Kreutler, Calum Bowden, and Jaya Klara Brekke, and then by a live Q+A with the audience.

Find out more and RSVP here.

6pm 

Follow artist and quantum physicist Libby Heaney as she plays Hivemind, a virtual knowledge game created by Trust. Heaney will use Hivemind to explore the new logic systems made available to us through quantum mechanics.

Find out more and RSVP here.

6-7pm

Join us live as two of the Compendium guild members – Namita Patel, fermentation scientist at the Francis Crick Institute, and Seetal Solanki, materials translator and co-founder of Ma-tt-er – discuss their journey as part of the making of Compendium, and how its microbial exploration has informed their own practices.

Find out more and RSVP here.