LONDON.- Next year, Serpentine will mark a quarter century since its ambitious annual Pavilion commission began with Dame Zaha Hadid’s inaugural structure in Hyde Park in 2000.
In 2025, Serpentine will host significant solo exhibitions by artists across generations who push the boundaries of media in today’s era of innovative technology, civic conversations, and environmental emergencies.
EXHIBITION | ARPITA SINGH | SERPENTINE NORTH | 13 MARCH – 27 JULY 2025
Opening in March 2025, Serpentine will present the first solo exhibition of Arpita Singh outside India, featuring key works selected in close collaboration with the artist from her prolific career spanning more than six decades.
Singh's paintings draw on Indian miniatures and narratives, interwoven with immediate experiences of social upheaval and international humanitarian crises. Remembering at Serpentine North will explore the full breadth of her practice, ranging from large-scale oil paintings to more intimate watercolours and ink drawings.
Born in Kolkota in 1937, Singh emerged in the 1960s, developing a painting practice that blends figuration and Surrealism, drawing inspiration from miniaturist painting and Bengali folk art. She combined this with periods of abstraction, using pen, ink and pastels to form dynamic lines and perforations on the surface to create layers and textures. From the 1990s, Singh increasingly explored themes of gender, motherhood, feminine sensuality and vulnerability, alongside metaphors of violence and political unrest in India and internationally. Singh resists singular interpretation, explaining, ‘I know that when the work grows the starting point melts, references become signals to lead anybody or everybody to the desired place. I don't remember myself, the frame breaks and I, the woman, stand there as anybody, as everybody.’
The exhibition builds on Serpentine’s legacy of spotlighting the work of pioneering artists who have not yet received the recognition they deserve in London. Past exhibitions include Faith Ringgold, Luchita Hurtado, James Barnor, and most recently, Barbara Chase-Riboud. To accompany the exhibition, Serpentine will publish a new catalogue, commissioning key authors, thinkers and other creatives to highlight Singh’s significant role in contemporary international art and her influence across generations and disciplines. The culmination of extensive research across India, Indian Highways was presented at Serpentine South in 2008 – 2009 as a snapshot of a vibrant generation of artists working across a range of media. Arpita Singh’s work was first encountered during the research for this show.
EXHIBITION | GIUSEPPE PENONE | SERPENTINE SOUTH | 3 APRIL – SEPTEMBER 2025
Opening in April 2025, Serpentine South will present a solo exhibition by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947, Garessio). This will be the most comprehensive survey of his practice in a major London institution, featuring sculptures and works on paper from 1977 to today. A leading figure in Arte Povera, Penone experimented with a wide range of materials including wood, iron, wax, bronze, terracotta, and plaster, bringing their individual physical qualities to the fore. Situated in the surroundings of Kensington Gardens, the exhibition will showcase the artist’s continued interest in the relationship between humans and the natural world.
With a career spanning over five decades, Penone’s expansive oeuvre encompasses sculptures, drawings, painting, installations, and photography. Born in Garessio, a village near Cuneo, Italy, Penone is influenced by the forested region of Northern Italy. The vegetal world is a central subject in his work, creating his first Alberi (Trees) in 1969, he cites the tree as ‘primal and most simple idea of vitality, of culture, of sculpture’. Through uncovering the visual, tactile and olfactory aspects of the materials he uses, Penone’s work highlights the interconnected nature of beings, both living and non-living, in existence.
Giuseppe Penone’s work has been featured in exhibitions worldwide, including at the Fondazione Ferrero, Alba, (2024-2025); Galleria Borghese, Rome (2023); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022, 2004); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2022); Villa Medici, Rome (2021) and Palais d'léna - CESE, Paris, France (2019). He currently lives and works in Turin, Italy.
Ecologies at Serpentine encompass myriad convenings, networks, infrastructural and long-term research projects which hold ecology and the environment at their core. Giuseppe Penone was one of the participants of the Garden Marathon featured at Serpentine in 2011. This two-day event was an exploration of the concept of the garden. The artist is also featured in the book 140 Artists' Ideas for Planet Earth, published by Serpentine and Penguin.
25 YEARS OF THE SERPENTINE PAVILION COMMISSION IN 2025
This pioneering commission, which began in 2000 with Dame Zaha Hadid, has presented the first UK structures by some of the biggest names in international architecture.
2025 will see the unveiling of a new Pavilion and kickstart a programme of events to reflect on the commission, its history and its future.
The Pavilion is realised with the support of technical advisors AECOM. In recent years it has grown into a highly anticipated showcase for emerging talents, from Sumayya Vally, Counterspace (South Africa), the youngest architect to be commissioned, and Frida Escobedo (Mexico), to Diébédo Francis Kéré (Burkina Faso) and Bjarke Ingels (Denmark). In 2022, Black Chapel was designed by Theaster Gates (US), in 2023 À table was designed by Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture (France and Lebanon), and in 2024 Archipelagic Void was designed by Minsuk Cho, Mass Studies (South Korea).
Serpentine will present Park Nights, its experimental, interdisciplinary, live programme sited within the annual architectural commission. Since 2002, Park Nights has presented performances across art, music, film, theatre, dance, literature, philosophy, fashion, and technology. Each year’s commissions respond to the unique architecture of the Pavilion, inviting audiences to experience the activated space.
SERPENTINE ARTS TECHNOLOGIES EXHIBITION | DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY | SERPENTINE NORTH | AUTUMN 2025 – 2026
In Autumn 2025, Berlin and London-based artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, London) will present a major new collaborative video game, exhibition and R&D project, commissioned and produced by Serpentine Arts Technologies, at Serpentine North.
Working predominantly in animation, sound, performance, and video game development, Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice focuses on intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively archive and empower Black Trans stories.
Encouraging the active participation of the visitor-player in her installations, the artist highlights the role of individual choices in shaping narratives and histories. The project will bring together artists, technologists, interaction designers and specialist research to expand the artist’s exploration of the creative and civic potential of video game technologies.
Building on her love of retro choose-your-own-adventure games, improv theatre and new research into online communities, digital democracy and the extreme polarisation of today’s world, this project implicates the ‘audience as medium’ to activate and complete the work. At the core of the project will be a new game that will be developed over the course of the next year. Conceptualised as a ‘performance machine’, or performance infrastructure, the game will be activated throughout an immersive exhibition, which will function as a live playtest, ‘social experiment’ and living archive, where players’ inputs determine how the story – a speculative future fiction - continues.
Serpentine Arts Technologies has been working with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley since 2021, when she was invited to contribute to Future Art Ecosystems 2: Art x Metaverse, a report that examined how the metaverse represents a fundamental shift in our notion of digital systems and the impact of the video games industry on art and culture. Since then, Serpentine Arts Technologies has collaborated on R&D, developing prototypes and experimental hybrid gaming projects including WE CAN’T DO THIS ALONE, YOUR PRESENCE ALONE CHANGES HOW OTHERS BREATHE, and THE LACK.
WE CAN’T DO THIS ALONE hosted in 2022, was an interactive playtesting event in the form of a live improv play, where the audience became the actors. YOUR PRESENCE ALONE CHANGES HOW OTHERS BREATHE, in 2022, was conceived as an interactive murder mystery and conversation hosted via Twitch. THE LACK: I KNEW YOUR VOICE BEFORE YOU SPOKE was commissioned in collaboration with Art Night and NeON Digital Arts for Art Night Dundee in 2023. In this dystopic, interactive art video game, audiences shaped a new world through their interactions, highlighting the urgency of choices in a time of meteoric change.
This marks the continuation of Serpentine Arts Technologies’ ongoing commitment to video game technologies, in particular game engines, through commissions such as Ian Cheng, Bad Corgi (2015) and B.O.B. (2018), Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Catharsis (2020); Trust, Hivemind (2022) and Gabriel Massan & Collaborators, Third World: The Bottom Dimension (2023). As with the current exhibition, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst: The Call, the project will be supported by the Future Art Ecosystems initiative in the development of technical, legal and creative R&D to be shared with the wider cultural sector that explores how to embed technological spaces with ethical and community-focused infrastructures.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019. Danielle’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and performances at institutions including Fundació Joan Miró (2024); LAS (2024); Studio Voltaire (2024); SCAD (2023) ArtNight (2023); FACT (2022) David Kordansky, LA (2022) Project Arts Centre, Ireland (2022); Skänes konstförening, Malmö, Sweden (2022); Arebyte Gallery (2021); QUAD (2021); Albright-Knox (2021); and Science Gallery, London (2020). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions including WSA (2024), Julia Stoschek Foundation (2022); Les Urbaines (2019) and Barbican (2018).
SERPENTINE ARTS TECHNOLOGIES PUBLICATIONS | WINTER 2024
Gabriel Massan
Gabriel Massan: Third World - The Bottom Dimension, challenges us to reconsider the ways we understand our actions in the world through the lens of decoloniality, queer theories, and decentralized strategies in technology, economics, and philosophy. The project, developed through collaboration and a multiplicity of voices, builds, through this publication, a portal for us to enter a state of radical imagination.
This publication is released in celebration of the project’s tour to Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil in August 2024, and commissioned by Serpentine in 2023. Focusing on the video game at its core, it covers the context and process of its production, introduces the artistic practice of Gabriel Massan and their collaborators, and shares development materials, including conversations, images, texts, and designs.
Commissioned texts from Denise Ferriera da Silva, Lorraine Mendes, Tamar Clarke-Brown and Ayrson Heráclito address the project’s wider thematics of worldbuilding, technology, spirituality and decolonisation, while positioning the critical importance of this innovative project in the socio-political present.
The book takes the format of ‘workbook/exercise book’, including commissioned exercises from the project’s contributing artists; Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Novíssimo Edgar, LYZZA, Ventura Profana. This fully illustrated publication documents the project and takes a playful and engaging approach to guiding its readers on a journey of multidimensional learning.
Future Art Ecosystems 5
Future Art Ecosystems (FAE) is an initiative by Serpentine Arts Technologies that supports the development of the art and technology ecosystem for the public good through research, reports and experimental projects. Since 2020, its annual publications have focused on the implications of different technologies for art and cultural organisations, providing concepts, references, language and arguments that can be implemented into operational agendas. Previous publications have contributed important insights and strategies relating to AI, blockchain and the metaverse.
With the growth of the art and technology ecosystem over the course of the last decade, ‘creative R&D’ has been gaining traction as a self-standing area of artistic and institutional activity. The fifth volume of FAE: Future Art Ecosystems 5: Art x Creative R&D (FAE5), planned for release in May 2025, maps out this evolving space and makes recommendations as to how the cultural sector, creative industries, civic technology and policy contribute to shaping it. FAE5 will explore the impacts and public value that R&D can have as a major aspect of cultural production by demonstrating the R&D potential of artistic production processes as a vital space of societal experimentation with advanced technologies.
All Media is Training Data
In 2025, following The Call, the first UK solo exhibition of Berlin-based artists and musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst at Serpentine South, a new book titled All Media is Training Data will be published by Serpentine, which chronicles the artists’ career. Told through chapters that expand their evolving theses on cultural production, this publication features a decade of artworks, reflections, and key references by Herndon and Dryhurst along with written contributions by Benjamin Bratton, Francesca Bria, Liz Pelly, Ryan Murdock, Kei Kreutler and Primavera De Filippi.
