RE:VISION @ The Courtauld Institute of Arts
- Fatemeh Parvin
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
For the sixteenth edition of the East Wing Biennial, RE:VISION gathers contemporary artists to interrogate the role of the arts as a means to both shatter and refract how we understand our inherited histories. From the end of September 2025 to August 2027, the student-curated exhibition will be displayed at the Courtauld Institute of Art, standing testament to how a future of unity and resistance can only be furthered in light of plurality and difference.
The exhibition consists of two floors, spanning across lecture theatres, seminar rooms and echoing staircases. Each room displays an impressive breadth of pieces that range from found object sculptures and cyanotype print installations, to the opening night films and sight-specific performances. What binds each room is not the limitation of one theme, rather, the prefix "RE" that accompanies the sub-theme set for each of the nine rooms. It acts as what head curator Madeline Cheeseman calls "a piece of invisible string that laces and links each artist [...] lenses through which to illuminate a different inflection of revision."
At a time when we are coaxed into choosing between disparate accounts of our lived realities, the exhibition proposes an alternative approach. Namely, to illuminate the fragmentary nature of historical narratives, while at the same time allowing for differences to simply coexist, with no intent to prove one or the other's dominance. To move from the stifling structures of the past, the exhibition calls on artists and viewers alike to see, remember, and imagine, but also, to re:present, re:collect, and re:construct.
Through the film stills of Pipilotti Rist, portrayals of identity which transcend national and cultural borders in the prints by Yinka Shonibare, alongside considerations of remembering through collecting and collaging ideas in the photographs by Dora Maar and Jeff Wall, the exhibition releases us into the visions of these artists’ imagined futures.
RE:VISION speaks to, and of, the Courtauld Institute’s influence in how we conceive of our inherited histories. In the first room, we find ourselves revelling in the serene soft pinks and muted greens of Susan Kellaway's impressionistic Blancmange's Rabbit, after Manet (2024). Yet our aesthetic intrigue lets way for us to attend more to the central figure; her eyes, wan and tired, her skin, flushed, the sole nude figure. The sailor presents her with a rabbit shaped blancmange, in French, a white or bland dish, which she eyes with indifference. It seems she is too defeated to resist her predicament, a hostage to ingesting a dish, perhaps a fate, with superficial appeal. We feel as though her melancholic expression permeates the canvas as an echo of impressionism’s long overlooked injustices -- Degas's brothels and ballerinas of the night come to mind. Kellaway has captured what Degas critic Huysmans discussed as the “attentive cruelty” of his art.
Hanging in the second floor staircase is Laura Jane Hegarty's 'After Isobel', an installation of cyanotype print on draping fabric tracing the artist's maternal lineage beginning from her grandmother, Isobel. Indigo blue backgrounds white bodily impressions which stir with the drafts of the staircase. Each layer of fabric is hung so closely to another that no position on the winding steps allows a complete view of all three bodies, only an awareness of their ghostly presence. It is fitting that a history so intimately encoded in one's genetic makeup has been captured by the oldest photographic medium. As onlookers, we cannot help but be estranged from what these bodies hold in memory, for it is only traceable through touch and kin.
According to Cheeseman, the diversity of the works can be attributed to how the majority of the artists were selected from an open call. Hence the exhibition displays a constellation of contemporary sculptures, visual storytellers, artistic documentarians, and all around imaginaries. It is their endeavour to question historical authority and the means by which the artist's hand can both compound and unravel its complexity.
It is also of note that the exhibition is free to all, though you must contact the gallery to book your visit via eastwingbienial@courtauld.ac.uk. with 48 hours notice. The Courtauldian Institute itself will remain a working building for the following two years of the exhibition. The exhibition, at a level beyond what is the immediately perceptible artworks on display, becomes a site of constant reimaginings as the students create in their presence.
The artworks at RE:VISION reminds us that we cannot let one story, even if it is the one we tell of ourselves, supersede historical reality. From continuing along a historical path defined by past strictures, we may find ourselves confronted with a path where the future waits in all its layered ambiguity, to a future unbounded.
Edited by Daria Slikker, Deputy Editor-in-Chief
