Disruptors: Fractured Images and Migrant Wordl

Disruptors: Fractured Images and Migrant Wordl is a collaborative exhibition bringing together works from the Ben Uri and William Allen Collections with additional loans from artists and private collections, featuring more than 50 works and previously unseen archival material. It traces more than a century of experimentation in word-image relations, from early twentieth-century historical avant-garde practice to post-war developments in concrete poetry and conceptual art. Spanning collage, painting, sculpture, book-art, textiles, photography, typography, mixed media and archival material, the exhibition brings together artists who disrupt the boundary between reading and viewing.

Disruption here operates on two levels. It begins as a creative force within the historical avant-gardes and the paths that followed, as artists move words across surfaces and unsettle the conventions of syntax and image-making. It also speaks to lives shaped by movement, from the forced journeys of those fleeing Nazism, to post-war migration, to second-generation artists navigating between cultures, and to the ongoing question of belonging and resettlement. ‘Wordl’, coined in the spirit of the avant-garde’s restless reshaping of language, fuses ‘word’ and ‘world’. It evokes arrival in the UK by different routes, the acquisition of new languages, and the forging of new relationships between word and image, while reshaping the British art world.

Beginning with the émigré artist Kurt Schwitters and his pioneering collages, the exhibition traces successive waves of migration and the questions they raise. It moves through artists displaced by the Second World War, including Alfred Lomnitz, Hugo Dachinger, Gustav Metzger and Shmuel Dresner. A later generation, among them Henri Chopin, Astrid Furnival, Hansjörg Mayer, John Sharkey, Li Yuan-chia, Susan Hiller and Verdi Yahooda, arrived in the UK in the post-war period. Ian Hamilton Finlay and Dom Sylvester Houédard complicate any stable sense of Britishness, while David Medalla, José Maria Cruxent and Martha Hellion speak to the countercultural energies of the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, Tam Joseph, Hormazd Narielwalla, Astra Papachristodoulou and Osman Yousefzada bring questions of identity and migration into the present.

Disruptors is curated by Dr. Ana-Maria Milčić, Senior Research Officer at the Ben Uri Research Unit and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. ‘The life stories of the artists on view,’ the curator says, ‘invite us to consider what it means to belong in the UK. Their works range from cryptic visual languages to a playful use of text, engaging questions of movement, migration, exile, nostalgia, identity, and the making of meaning.’

Dr. Catherine Pütz FRSA, Director Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, comments: ‘The Disruptors exhibition finds a highly suitable home at the Ben Uri Gallery, founded in 1915, and today celebrating the wider contribution of migrant artists and creatives to British society. In its early years it was an Arts Society characterised by its energy and by diverse and precocious talent across a multitude of disciplines. Its artists and writers were as passionate about relevance as they were about the primacy of invention and the imagination. The cross-cultural ferment of forms and practice that we encounter here offers a unique view of the freedoms artists have forged for themselves for decades, exploring their identity in a way that is so current.’

William Allen has specialised in word-and-image material for over 30 years, working with concrete and visual poetry, artists’ books, documents and ephemera, European and South American avant-gardes, and artists including Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Li Yuan-chia and Gustav Metzger.