LONDON.- The South London Gallery and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art announce the exhibition The Place Is Here. Originally presented at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2016) and recently shown in an expanded version at Nottingham Contemporary (February – April 2017), this new iteration of the exhibition across two venues brings together painting, photography, video and archival materials from the 1970s and 1980s by 25 artists and collectives.

The Place is Here evokes some of the debates taking place between black artists, writers and institutions in the UK in the 1980s. Across two venues the works and archives on display show how a new generation of practitioners were responding to a range of discourses and politics: Civil Rights-era “Black art” from the US; Margaret Thatcher's anti-immigration policies and the resulting uprisings across the country; apartheid in South Africa; and black feminism. This group of artists were also reworking and subverting a range of art-historical references and aesthetic strategies – from William Morris to Pop Art, documentary practices or the introduction of Third Cinema to the UK. Revisiting these discussions today, at a time when the UK is increasingly divided, is both timely and prescient.

The two parts of the exhibition offer different, though overlapping, entry points into this pivotal decade for British culture. At the South London Gallery, a constellation of film, photography, painting and archives show how artists were drawing on myriad forms of representation and storytelling to interrogate race, gender and sexual politics. Different forms of self-portraiture and self-representation appear throughout the main gallery in the work of artists such as Rasheed Araeen, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, Mona Hatoum and Donald Rodney. Films by Martina Attille and the Black Audio Film Collective in the first floor galleries show the way in which narrative and documentary were being explored and tested by an emerging generation of black filmmakers.

At Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, the work of sixteen artists forms a dialogue between the history and legacy of colonialism and the racialised, antiimmigration politics initiated by Margaret Thatcher. Collage works by Eddie Chambers and Chila Kumari Burman, for example, make direct references to the spectre of the National Front in the late 1970s and 1980s or Thatcher’s infamous swamping speech of 1978, whilst documentary works by Ceddo Film and Video Workshop and John Akomfrah examine the uprisings and civil unrest sweeping the UK at the time. These are shown in conversation with paintings and cut outs by Lubaina Himid, Sutapa Biswas and Sonia Boyce that explore different colonial legacies and black emancipatory struggles.

Throughout the two parts of the exhibition, montage emerges as a key device through which artists were re-assembling histories and identities under new terms. This is visible across different media through what art historian Kobena Mercer has described as “formal and aesthetic strategies of hybridity”. The Place Is Here has unfolded as a kind of montage with works and histories forming new relations to one another across the different stages of this exhibition. Positions, voices, media and archives are assembled in constellations to present a portrait of a period that is not tightly defined, finalised or pinned down.

Artists include: Said Adrus, John Akomfrah, Rasheed Araeen, Martina Attille, David A. Bailey, Black Audio Film Collective, Sutapa Biswas, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, Ceddo Film and Video Collective, Eddie Chambers, Joy Gregory, Sunil Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Gavin Jantjes, Claudette Johnson, Chila Kumari Burman, Dave Lewis, Mowbray Odonkor, Pratibha Parmar, Maybelle Peters, Keith Piper, Ingrid Pollard, Donald Rodney, Marlene Smith, Maud Sulter.

Archives include: Blk Art Group Research Project, Brixton Art Gallery Archive, The June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (films by Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, Maybelle Peters), Making Histories Visible Archive (Centre of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire).

Curator: Nick Aikens

Archival displays curated in collaboration with June Givanni, Lubaina Himid, Andrew Hurman and Marlene Smith.