We are thrilled to announce the first institutional exhibition showcasing the artworks of Anna Mendelssohn, a poet, writer, and artist, also known as Grace Lake. Curated by our Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, this exhibition is open to the public from 11 October 2023 to 21 January 2024.
This archival exhibition presents a selection of Mendelssohn’s poetry and works on paper. Through the confluence of poetry and visual art, Mendelssohn explores—amongst other things—the socio-historical mechanisms which influence the creation and destruction of language in public and private spheres. 'Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess' brings together works which examine how iniquities such as war, fascism, and incarceration influence the ways we express and give form to history and social experience.
Central to the exhibition is 'Untitled (Relentless)' (c. 1997), a series of seven sheets illustrating a poem of the same name with acrylic, chalk, and pastel. As a visual artwork, Mendelssohn presents the poem as one to be engaged with at a different scale, amplifying the speaker’s sense of urgency in its opening lines: 'poetry races through / these streets, hitting / itself against stone walls'. Elsewhere, Mendelssohn’s 'Untitled (Ideogram)' (c. 1980–1983) works signify the artist’s fascination with written languages interpretable through symbolism or the pictorial such as Arabic and Chinese, while 'Untitled (Key)' (c.1970s-mid-1980s) sees her codifying natural phenomena, objects, metaphysics, and forms of speech as discrete, abstracted signs. This exhibition takes its title from Mendelssohn’s poem ‘fragment; redundance; wordsworth.’ (1996): 'speak, poetess, speak in the end – / what has been Taken – / will always be being spoken to you'.
'Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess' is curated by Cheung, with Sara Crangle, Professor of Modernism & the Avant-Garde at the University of Sussex as curatorial consultant. This exhibition serves as a major outcome of Cheung's six-month Curatorial Fellowship at Whitechapel Gallery, which stands as one of our many initiatives dedicated to nurturing curatorial practices and disseminating knowledge about Chinese and Sinophone contemporary art through global exchange.
Learn more about the exhibition here.