Whitechapel Art Gallery - London

This 40-minute screening programme explores the enduring effects of colonialism through contemporary moving image work from four artists living and working across Latin America: Carolina Caycedo (b.1978, UK), Seba Calfuqueo (b.1991, Chile), Aline Motta (b.1974, Brazil), Regina José Galindo (b. 1974, Guatemala). Addressing historical issues surrounding race, identity, and environmental causes, water emerges as a symbolic thread present across all the films connecting and foregrounding individuals, communities, and regions that have long been overlooked and marginalised, through diverse visual languages and poetic approaches. All films are captioned and visitors are welcome to enter Assembly Room at any time during the screenings.

Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, will be the first major survey show of the artist, Joy Gregory (b.1959, UK), winner of the eighth annual Freelands Award and one of the UK’s most innovative artists working with photography today. Spanning four decades, this landmark exhibition brings together over 250 works encompassing photography, film, installation and textiles, all of which showcase and celebrate Gregory’s inventive, culturally resonant and materially rich practice. Since the early 1980s, Gregory has been a pioneering force in contemporary photography, playing a critical role in its development nationally and internationally. Her work explores identity, history, race, gender and societal ideals of beauty, while expanding photography’s aesthetic and material possibilities.  Gregory employs a diverse range of media and methods, encompassing Victorian photographic techniques such as cyanotypes and kallitypes, as well as digital media and performance. Conceptually rigorous and visually seductive, Gregory’s work invites important reflection on power structures, representation and cultural memory. The exhibition’s title comes from the proverb, ‘you catch more flies with honey than vinegar’, a phrase that Gregory’s mother used to say to her.  It encapsulates her approach to art as political ‘with a small p’; her intimate, visually pleasurable and poetic works encouraging nuanced rather than polemical discussion.

Whitechapel Gallery presents a new commission from artist Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, Massachusetts, US) featuring an absorbing and disorientating labyrinth. ... Visitors to g/hosti are plunged into a circular labyrinth made from curved, painted cardboard panels that depict a fantastical world populated by animals and other creatures. The structure towers above head height, while cut-out sections and undulating edges offer glimpses of spaces beyond. Visitors move through the visually lush landscape of brushstrokes and textures as if entering the layers of a painting. Along the way they encounter watchful wolves, tender mice and playing cats – the bright colours, patterns, animal imagery and cardboard materials evoking childhood and play. Yet sinister and sometimes startling images lurk in the detail – including human cadavers that peek out from the shrubbery – creating a relentless environment that threatens to engulf the viewer.

Fierce and Fearless is a textile installation celebrating women as central figures in folklore, myth and legend. Printed and embroidered panels form an immersive tent, illustrated with stories of fearless female protagonists and offering a hub for participatory activities throughout the season. Step inside, join an activity, create new stories. Fierce and Fierce will host school and university groups, and sessions led by local charities and community groups, including the British Bilingual Poetry Collective, 3EIB, Xenia. The installation’s fabric is the inspiration for a collective embroidery project led by artist Jasmin Bhanji in Assembly Room during the half-term holidays (29 October-2 November).