‘Here is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis & Survival’, a major exhibition exploring the capacity of artworks to both warn us of political, social and ecological upheaval, and to serve as a source of replenishment will run from 22 March – 29 June 2025, at Kettle’s Yard.
It will bring together eight contemporary artists working across forms, territories and generations, each responding to specific moments and broader systems of instability, from housing crises and ecological breakdown to racialised violence and colonial displacement. These artists may attest to a broken world, but they also work to heal, mend and imagine new possibilities for survival.
‘Here is a Gale Warning’ will gather sculpture, painting, photography, moving image and installations by Pia Arke (1958–2007), Justin Caguiat (b. 1989, Japan), Rose Finn-Kelcey (1945–2014), Candace Hill-Montgomery (b. 1945, USA), Tomashi Jackson (b. 1980, USA), Tarek Lakhrissi (b. 1992, France), Anne Tallentire (b. 1949, Northern Ireland) and Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Chile). Drawing together artists working in different media and distinct contexts, the exhibition finds points of connection and solidarity across generations, moments, priorities and struggles.
The show borrows its title from the 1971 work Here is a Gale Warning by Rose Finn-Kelcey, a hand sewn flag originally installed on scaffolding on Alexandra Palace. Bearing its matter-of-fact message in block capitals, the flag broadcasts an emergency already in progress, alerting us to the fact that perpetual crisis nonetheless demands vigilant attention. In the first gallery space, documentation of Here is a Gale Warning will give way to an installation by Candace Hill- Montgomery which has been specially conceived for the exhibition. Comprising works from across her five-decade career – including a large-scale drawing based on a 1980 work memorialising the assassinated Black Panther Fred Hampton, and more recent multimedia weavings instigated by incidents taken from the news cycle – this will be the first extended presentation of Hill-Montgomery’s work in the UK in four decades.
Hill-Montgomery’s installation will be placed in dialogue with Cecilia Vicuña’s photographic documentation of her precarious sculptures made in the streets of New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. Exhibited in the UK for the first time, these works capture constructions that Vicuña made in collaboration with, and sacrificed to, the urban landscape, playfully showing the city as a site for creative practice and a host for vulnerable beauty. Also on view will be Vicuña’s film Cloud-Net (1999), which documents the artist weaving a quipu – an Andean knotted device for the transmission of information – around the supports of the Brooklyn Bridge, reinscribing the built environment with systems of Indigenous knowledge lost to colonialism.
In parallel to this, Pia Arke’s Untitled (Torn, reassembled, and annotated camera obscura photostat) (1993) juxtaposes a ripped-up image of Nuugaarsuk Point in Greenland, home to Inuit Thule, with Danish translations of extinct East Greenlandic songs of struggle and resistance. Arke’s combination of violently partitioned, but reassembled, landscapes with erased wisdom, displaced by translation, marks out the deep wounds that persist in survival. Nearby, Tarek Lakhrissi’s sonic installation Unfinished Sentence I (2019) will unfold a speculative counternarrative of queer rebellion and resilience. Inspired by Monique Wittig’s lesbian epic Les Guérillères (1969), Lakhrissi refashions metal spears into curling vines, through which the visitor will be invited to find their own path.
In the neighbouring gallery space, Tomashi Jackson’s wall-based works will summon solidarities across time and place. Drawing on an array of references including targeted, racialised raids by the Los Angeles Police Department and the New Cross fire of 1981, Jackson produces awning-like structures that propose congregation and community as a buffer against crisis. Justin Caguiat’s large-scale paintings in the same section will open up rich interior worlds, both decadent and toxic. These sensuous works play with reality and fantasy, inviting us to consider other imaginative possibilities.
Caguiat’s painted worlds will correspond with a selection of sculptures from Anne Tallentire’s Interspacings series (2018), which reimagine the living spaces afforded to prisoners as architectural models. Fabricated from rudimentary materials, including tape and construction supplies, these works measure both the limits of a cell and, through Tallentire’s reassembling, the possibilities of imagining new structures within utilitarian contexts. A newly commissioned large-scale drawing by Tallentire will return to the artist’s longstanding interest in social housing, setting the domestic space of the Kettle’s Yard house (home to Jim and Helen Ede from 1957–1973) in dialogue with Cambridge’s social housing developments during the same period.
‘Here is a Gale Warning’ is curated by Dr Amy Tobin, Curator, Contemporary Programmes at Kettle’s Yard. The exhibition will be accompanied by an essay written by Dr Amy Tobin. An additional display of works by Mari Mahr, conceived alongside the exhibition by Dr Inga Fraser, Senior Curator, House and Collection, will be on view in the Kettle’s Yard Research Space.
Lead image: Rose Finn-Kelcey. Here is a Gale Warning, 1971/2011 Silver gelatin print mounted on foam board 46 x 70cm © Estate of Rose Finn-Kelcey. Courtesy the Estate and Kate MacGarry, London
