As part of their London Visit, National Saturday Club members from across the UK visited some of London’s leading cultural institutions. The London Visit provides Club members with the important opportunity to engage with the rich creative and cultural offering of their capital city.
Special tours and exhibition tickets were generously arranged by a number of the programme’s cultural partners and we’re hugely grateful for their support. Read on for more about what’s been on in London and the galleries, exhibitions and workshops the Club members took part in on Saturday 19th November.
Barbican: Soheila Sokhanvari, Rebel Rebel
Rebel Rebel, the first major UK commission by Iranian artist Soheila Sokhanvari, celebrates and commemorates feminist icons from pre-revolutionary Iran. Sokhanvari transforms the Curve into a devotional space, populated with exquisite miniature portraits of glamorous cultural figures from Iran.
Image credit to Soheila Sokhanvari, courtesy Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery
The Courtauld
The Courtauld’s collection includes paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and decorative arts, ranging from the medieval period to the present day. Tours for Club members will get students to engage with The Courtauld collection, practising close looking and engaging with artwork and art history.
Image: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet
Design Museum: Weird Sensation Feels Good – The World of ASMR
This is the first exhibition of its kind to lift the world of ASMR out from your screen and into physical space.
ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is a physical sensation of euphoria or deep calm, sometimes a tingling in the body, triggered through sound, touch, and movement.
Image courtesy of Design Museum
Design Museum: Designer Maker User
This exhibition looks at the development of modern design through these three interconnected roles: Designer Maker User.
Club members will be able to view almost 1000 items of twentieth and twenty-first century design viewed through the angles of the designer, manufacturer and user, including a crowdsourced wall.
Image by Studio Myerscough
Design Museum: Objects of Desire
Curated with Vitra Design Museum, this exhibition will explore design from the birth of surrealism in 1924 to the current day; spanning classic Surrealist works of art and design as well as contemporary surrealist responses.
Image courtesy of Design Museum
Design Museum: Parables for Happiness
Club members will delve into the colourful world of artist and designer Yinka Ilori in this display that celebrates a unique mix of cultural influences and unpacks the ingredients of a diasporic visual language.
Photo by Felix Speller
English National Opera
Club members will have the opportunity to meet one of ENO’s lead costume supervisors, see some costume designs and try on costumes from ENO’s back catalogue. After a talk about the London Coliseum and its architect Frank Matcham, Club members will be taken on a private tour of London’s biggest theatre.
Image courtesy of ENO
London Transport Museum
During their visit to the London Transport Museum, Club members will learn about the history of typography design in London transport through a fun, interactive scavenger hunt and get the chance to design and print their very own letter using mono-printing techniques.
Image courtesy of London Transport Museum
Science Museum: Science Fiction – Voyage
On a dynamic interactive voyage, Club members will board and explore a unique spaceship, scout an unknown planet, and investigate how scientists and science fiction creators have imagined and built new worlds to better understand our own.
Image: Science Museum Group
Tate Britain: The Procession, Hew Locke
Club members will experience a session with Q-Art on how to look at and talk about contemporary art, using Hew Locke’s exhibition ‘The Procession.’ ‘The Procession’ invites visitors to ‘reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people and finance and power.’
The Photographer’s Gallery: Chris Killip, Retrospective
Club members will have the opportunity to explore Chris Killip’s full-career retrospective. Killip is one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary with work grounded in his sustained immersion into the communities he photographed, throughout the economic shifts of 1970s and 80s North of England.
Image: Family on a Sunday walk, Skinningrove, 1982 by Chris Killip. Courtesy Martin Parr Foundation.
V&A: Africa Fashion
Spanning iconic mid-20th century to contemporary creatives through photographs, textiles, music and the visual arts, Africa Fashion explores the vitality and global impact of a fashion scene as dynamic and varied as the continent itself.
Image: Victoria and Albert Museum
V&A: Hallyu! The Korean Wave
Hallyu! The Korean Wave showcases the colourful and dynamic popular culture of South Korea, exploring the makings of the Korean Wave and its global impact on the creative industries of cinema, drama, music, fandom, beauty and fashion.
Image: Victoria and Albert Museum
Whitechapel Gallery: Moving Bodies, Moving Images
Across a range of projections and screens dispersed throughout the galleries, Moving Bodies, Moving Images brings together a selection of short films made in the last decade by contemporary artists exploring the intersection of dance, choreography and moving image. Also on display are materials related to the making of the films, including production stills, research, reference texts and scores.
Whitechapel Gallery: Zadie Xa – House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness
Korean-Canadian artist, Zadie Xa presents her largest solo exhibition in London to date. Drawing on her own background, the works on display reflect the artist’s ongoing engagement with hybrid and diasporic identities, global history, folklore, and spiritual and religious rituals.
Photo by Andy Keate. Whitechapel Gallery, London