First UK exhibition of Lauren Halsey at Serpentine South.
Serpentine is delighted to present emajendat, the first UK exhibition of Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles, USA). On view at Serpentine South from 4 October 2024 to 2 March 2025, the exhibition will transform the gallery into an immersive funk garden with a site-specific installation responding to Kensington Gardens.
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.
Inside Halsey’s ‘garden’, visitors will move through technicoloured sand dunes before physically entering a life-size diorama. The walls and floors will be covered with the mirrored side of discarded CDs transforming the gallery through a prism-like effect while scaled-up recreations of figurines originally collected from swap meets and community members in and around South Central will populate the space. Sculptural components, plants, a live water feature with cupped hands showcasing the heavily adorned nails like those commonly worn in the Black community, found objects, ephemera and a bespoke wallpaper will densely populate the galleries. Traversing time, cultures and references, Halsey’s installation at Serpentine will draw on a wide range of sources and iconography that celebrates South Central’s rich visual culture and its inhabitants, offering blueprints for imagining new futures.
To coincide with the exhibition, Serpentine and Rizzoli will release the most comprehensive publication to date on Lauren Halsey.
Lauren Halsey: Emajendat 4 October 2024 - 2 March 2025
Serpentine South Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA
Tuesday – Sunday 10am-6pm
Further Information: LAUREN HALSEY: emajendat - Serpentine Galleries