Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Margate

Sugar, We’re Going Down borrows its title from the Fall Out Boy song that soundtracked a particular corner of Alex Morante and Enrique López Llamas’s adolescence, an era that pretty much started with the collapse of the Twin Towers and sort of ended with sparkly-skinned vampires. Perhaps that’s why Morante and López Llamas share an attraction to bodies under pressure and to the strange images that pressure can produce. Morante’s ceramics twist bodily anxiety into deteriorated creatures that seem to be mutating into fragile, vulnerable, corroded beasts, as the awareness of a body breaking down gives way to the fear of what it might become. López Llamas’s painted sculptures stage catastrophic and melodramatic displays of unsettling associations, where the anxieties of adulthood in the present world meet the persistent fear of never being enough, or not being special at all. This shared bag of emotions finds a temporary home in a crumpled, reflective silver cave. The works, placed entirely on the floor, inhabit a space that resembles a bunker, a hideout, or the headquarters of someone who has spent too much time trying to figure out what is really going on. Its paranoid logic leaves us with the sense that something is coming, someone is listening, or that somewhere things have already gone terribly wrong. This duo-show marks the end of López Llamas and Morante’s six-month stay at the Tracey Emin Foundation’s Victoria House Residency. It embraces how things come to an end, how materials fail, how bodies misbehave, how plans inevitably go south, and how there can be some kind of special comfort in knowing that we are all going down.

Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present Lures, a solo exhibition by Scottish-Iraqi artist Emii Alrai. Lures unfolds as a sculptural landscape shaped by excavation, myth and inherited memory. Alrai transforms the gallery into a shifting terrain, where fragments appear caught between ruin and reconstruction. Drawing on the aesthetics of archaeology and museology, her installations consider how objects become vessels for power, belief and cultural inheritance. The exhibition centres on the idea of the 'lure': an object that attracts, deceives or promises access to something beyond reach. Through vessels, architectural forms and sculptural interventions, Alrai explores the relationship between desire, geography and the body. Across the gallery, clay, steel and carved polystyrene form a landscape of partial monuments, reliquaries and speculative artefacts. Sculptures resembling unearthed vessels, carved landscapes and provisional structures operate as decoys, suggesting authenticity while revealing their constructed nature. Running throughout the exhibition is a tension between romance and violence, explored through heart burial, a practice particularly prevalent during the Crusades. Reserved largely for royalty, nobles and high-ranking figures, it involved the hearts of crusaders being preserved and returned from the Holy Land or elsewhere in Europe for burial at home, while others sent their hearts onwards to Jerusalem when unable to complete the journey themselves. These movements created a network of human remains crossing geographical and spiritual borders. Alrai is drawn to the allegorical charge of the heart as the imagined centre of desire and longing, physically attached to a desired place and forging connections to land through memory and devotion. Some vessel forms draw on Alrai’s research into the ornate containers used to house buried hearts, elevating human remains through ornamentation and care. Together, these elements create an environment where the past feels both present and fabricated, in which myth, memory and material evidence continually blur.