Serpentine

For the past decade, Lauren Halsey has developed a distinctive visual vocabulary deeply rooted in the South Central neighbourhood of Los Angeles where she and her family have lived for generations. Through maximalist installations and stand-alone objects, Halsey archives and remixes the signs and symbols that populate her environment. She has described herself as obsessed with material culture. Her regular wanderings through her neighbourhood, in which she documents the changing streetscape, are accompanied by a gathering of objects, posters, flyers, commercial signs, slogans and tags that celebrate local businesses and the communities’ activism which she adds to her studio archive. These eventually find their way into her floor- and wall-based assemblages, and miniature dioramas embedded in her ‘funkmound’ sculptures.

Halsey’s vibrant and energetic work merges past, present and future via her interests in the iconography of cultures in the African diaspora, ancient Egypt, Black and queer icons, visionary architecture and the visual and sonic maximalism associated with funk. At once radical and collaborative, Halsey’s practice extends to Summaeverythang, the community centre she founded in 2019 that is ‘dedicated to the empowerment and transcendence of Black and Brown folks socio-politically, economically, intellectually and artistically.’

emajendat, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK, builds on several recent major projects including the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (l), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden Commission, New York (2023) and keepers of the krown at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) where the artist reconfigured the form of the Hathoric column by carving the capitals with the likenesses and stories of people from her local community. Both of these projects offer increasingly ambitious architectural schemes that engage with their surroundings while functioning as testing grounds for Halsey’s ultimate ambition to create a public sculpture park sited in South Central Los Angeles.

Lauren Halsey: emajendat is curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Director of Programmes
(interim) and Chief Curator and Chris Bayley, Exhibitions Curator; and produced by Mike
Gaughan, Gallery Manager.