GLASGOW.- Tramway announced their latest exhibition with Turner Prize nominated Delaine Le Bas is now open. Le Bas was recently nominated for the Turner Prize 2024 for her presentation Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning at Secession, Vienna.
The announcement adds another layer of excitement to the exhibition in Tramway's main gallery Delainia: 17071965 Unfolding which takes the form of an expansive and layered installation which creates a dialogue between existing and new works.
Delainia: 17071965 Unfolding is an exhibition of work by artist Delaine Le Bas (1965) presented within an immersive, textile installation. Delaine’s objects, environments, textiles, costumes and performances exist at the intersection of the personal and the political, aligning their experiences as a Romani person with perspectives on land, movement, gender, and discrimination.
Across the exhibition, Delaine evokes forms of social and psychological commentary through the incorporation of texts from her journals, personal ephemera and re-activations of her archive which draw on childhood memories, stories and mythologies of her Romani ancestry as well as classical mythology and popular culture. Delaine explores these mythologies through a feminist lens, manifesting them as a cast of extraordinary female figures such as goddesses, visionaries and witches that populate her installations.
Tramway was previously the Glasgow site of To Gypsyland (2013), a travelling research project by Delaine and collaborator Barby Asante that explored Romani, Gypsy and Traveller presence in cities across the UK. In the intertwining of elements from past projects with new figures and narratives, Delainia reflects the ongoing address in the work of the mythologisation and demonisation of Romani, Gypsy and Traveller peoples in the UK and Europe. These concerns are amplified within present-day contexts of housing crisis, border control, forced displacement and environmental breakdown. Delaine’s work activates and reclaims space for new rituals and imaginaries of resistance against historical and contemporary environments of hostility.
Delaine Le Bas has exhibited her works extensively both in the UK and abroad. In June 2007, her work was included in the first Roma Pavilion at 52nd Venice Biennale and the Prague Biennale. She has continued participating in international events, including the 11th Berlin Biennale (2020), Harbstsalon, Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin (2019, 2017), Roma Pavillion at 58th Venice Biennale (2019), ANTI Athens Biennale, Athens (2018), 9th Gwangju Biennale (2011), National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (2014), Framer Framed, Amsterdam (2015), and a number of UK venues including solo exhibitions at Transmission, Glasgow (2018), Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, Bolton (2014), Phoenix, Brighton (2014), Chapter, Cardiff (2010), Transition, London (2005). 'St Sara Kali George’, Worthing Museum and Art Gallery (2021), 'Beware of Linguistic Engineering’, Maxim Gorki Theater (2022). She created a commissioned work for a group exhibition ‘Radical Landscapes’ for Tate Liverpool (2021). She has curated ‘House of Le Bas’(2023) an exhibition overviewing the history of practice of herself and her late artist husband Damian Le Bas for Whitechapel Gallery in London and a a solo show for Secession in Vienna in the summer 2023 for which she was nominated for the Turner Prize 2024.
