The title of this exhibition is inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ (1917). The thirteen verses of the poem each describe the presence and movement of a blackbird in a different way - creating multiple perspectives and viewpoints of the bird. The blackbird in the poem symbolises the importance of flexibility and fluidity in order to create space for multiple forms of experience, knowledge and understanding.

This exhibition borrows from Stevens’ approach, bringing together existing and newly commissioned artworks by thirteen artists and curators. Their working practices bring forward international, multicultural, multi-faith and feminist perspectives which shift very much like those of the blackbird in the poem.

Thirteen Ways of Looking explores different strategies of resistance that overlap and intersect in the physical spaces of the gallery and digitally online. They challenge where art belongs, where it’s experienced and who is being addressed.

In this exhibition the work of Andreana Fatta, Roshini Kempadoo, Farwa Moledina and Keith Piper explore the archive and personal and cultural memories as strategies of resistance. Hira Butt, Eddie Chambers, Sonya Dyer, Hyphen-Labs, Navi Kaur and Shiyi Li centre the lived experiences and knowledge of people of colour in and through their work. Shama Khanna and Matías Serra Delmar disrupt traditional ways of viewing art and force us to question where art belongs. Hyphen-Labs, Shama Khanna and Donald Rodney explore digital spaces as sites for disruption and representation. The importance of imagined, futuristic, geographical, domestic and faith spaces in relation to home and belonging can be seen in the work of several of the artists.

Sonya Dyer
Hailing Frequencies Open
2019
Video

The two films in the exhibition are part of an ongoing series of video works generated from interviews by Sonya Dyer with Black women scientists (Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein & Dr Miranda Lowe), exploring the meaning of HeLa cells, the collision between Black bodies and medical sciences and the relationship between science and science fiction. Hailing Frequencies Open is an expansive body of work by Dyer, intersecting the Greek myth of Andromeda, actor Nichelle Nichols’ (Star Trek’s Uhura) astronaut recruitment activism and the complex genesis of HeLa cells.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33585