Serpentine is delighted to current emajendat, the primary UK exhibition of Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles, USA). On view at Serpentine South by way of February 23, 2025, the exhibition will remodel the gallery into an immersive atmosphere that responds to Serpentine’s location in Kensington Gardens.
For the previous decade, Lauren Halsey has developed a particular visible vocabulary deeply rooted within the South Central neighbourhood of Los Angeles the place she and her household have lived for generations. Via maximalist installations and stand-alone objects, Halsey archives and remixes the indicators and symbols that populate her atmosphere. She has described herself as obsessive about materials tradition. Her common wanderings by way of her neighbourhood, during which she paperwork the altering streetscape, are accompanied by a gathering of objects, posters, flyers, business indicators, slogans and tags that commemorate native companies and the communities’ activism which she provides to her studio archive. These finally discover their means into her floor- and wall-based assemblages, and miniature dioramas embedded in her ‘funkmound’ sculptures.
Halsey’s vibrant and energetic work merges previous, current and future by way of her pursuits within the iconography of cultures within the African diaspora, historical Egypt, Black and queer icons, visionary structure and the visible and sonic maximalism related to funk. Directly radical and collaborative, Halsey’s apply extends to Summaeverythang, the neighborhood centre she based in 2019 that’s ‘devoted to the empowerment and transcendence of Black and Brown people socio-politically, economically, intellectually and artistically.’
emajendat, the artist’s first solo exhibition within the UK, builds on a number of latest main tasks together with the eastside of south central l. a. hieroglyph prototype structure (l), for the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork’s Roof Backyard Fee, New York (2023) and keepers of the krown on the sixtieth Venice Biennale (2024) the place the artist reconfigured the type of the Hathoric column by carving the capitals with the likenesses and tales of individuals from her local people. Each of those tasks supply more and more bold architectural schemes that interact with their environment whereas functioning as testing grounds for Halsey’s final ambition to create a public sculpture park sited in South Central Los Angeles.
