To Be Held, curated by Ronan Mckenzie, brings together twenty artists and three furniture designers in an immersive exhibition which aims to open a dialogue on tenderness, and what it means to care and be cared for. The show presents works from a range of disciplines including painting, sculpture and scent; inviting us to consider the relationship between our experiences, and our internal sense of grounding and joy. To Be Held explores the impact of how we choose to share our spaces with all that they encompass, intentionally creating environments that we fill with love, and allow them, and those who inhabit them to care for us in return.

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What does it mean to be held? To see and be seen, to be warmed by surroundings which create space for one to feel and be felt, to be comforted by the knowing of acceptance and to leave by choice, when one chooses. For the doors to always be open, for ears to always be available, to be soothed by an atmosphere which calms and cares, which touches old memories that tickle before becoming visual. To be held in a space is to relax into one’s breathing because we know that we’re not alone.

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Participating artists include: Annan Affotey, Alvin Armstrong, Mabintou Badjie, Chris Bramble, Toby Cato, CHUKES, Mac Collins, Rayvenn D’Clark, Shaye Gregan, Ezra-Lloyd Jackson, Adama Jalloh, Julianknxx, Alfie Kungu, Mario Moore, Ronan Mckenzie, Ronan Mckenzie and Jobe Burns, Sola Olulode, Natassja E Swift, Naomi Williams and Joy Yamusangie.

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With furniture designs by: Modular by Mensah, ROL Studio by Holly Rollins and Miminat Shodeinde.

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The RA art sales programme proudly presents their first collaboration with HOME by Ronan Mckenzie. Close to HOME is a selling display bringing together works by eight practitioners born or based within eight miles of the Royal Academy of Arts, celebrating the rich artistic practices and craft cultivated, nurtured and developed in proximity to the RA. As a continuation of one of HOME's grounding missions; to create more space for BIPOC artists based within the UK, Close to HOME creates an opportunity for these eight local practitioners to find a HOME at the RA and for visitors to discover and connect with works made in our immediate surroundings.

Featuring works by: Ibrahim Azab, Mabintou Badjie, Toby Cato, Tasneem Elnayal, Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy, Emily Moore, Tonique Sewell and Elif Yanya

Take a journey through our previous exhibitions, showcasing a range of POC artists based in the UK. Through our programme we have engaged a number of disciplines; painting, photography, sculpture and textile.

What happens when we consider what exists beyond our physical realm? What do we see? What do we feel? What do we encounter? 

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In their collaborative exhibition ‘Modern Artefacts’, brothers Connor Kawaii and Ryan Hawaii invite us into their uncovered temple, bringing their ideas around the spiritual world to life. Through the use of symbolism, the artists have created a visual language to signify complex ideas around the spiritual and the metaphysical. Fusing their individual practices together,  the multidisciplinary exhibition includes Connor’s collages, and Ryan’s drawings amongst other works and explorations. 

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A recurring motif that has been ever present in both their practices is the rejection of the status quo and the desire to shed light into the subcultures they exist within. This rebellion is reflected in the characters that feature within the collages that Connor intricately layers; a skill he picked up when he had broken his wrist and was forced to find alternative outlets. He seeks to breathe new life into images that would otherwise go unseen or forgotten. Influenced heavily by punk culture, over the last decade Ryan has combined drawing and textile work which often features his famous ‘eyeman’, his practice serving as a vehicle to articulate his experiences. 

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Their Cuban-Jamaican heritage underpins the embodiment of this uncovered temple by borrowing from spatial design elements that exist within their culture.

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To belong, is to breathe. Inhale, exhale, knowing you are safe, knowing you are loved. We are communal beings. We always have been. Many of us do not have a community to call on. It is my wish, that one day, we all breathe, inhale, exhale, knowing we are safe, knowing we are loved.

These pieces are about feeling lost, and feeling found.

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BE GOOD NOW is a personal photo project by Ronan Mckenzie, created in collaboration with Acne Studios FW22 denim. The exhibition is an assemblage of images and texts that seek to explore Mckenzie’s connections with her Caribbean heritage and identity. Captured in Barbados, the birthplace of Mckenzie’s mother, the project manifests over several chapters: a fashion story styled by Tess Herbert and modelled by local talent; a documentary film titled ‘Rememory’, featuring Mckenzie’s mother; and a self-shot video featuring Mckenzie herself.

To feel cared for, to feel the comfort of one’s tenderness, and to extend that outwards is to open one’s heart, soul, and spirit to sharing the heights of our happiness, and the instability of our uncertainty, to breathe heavily at the end of a phone line knowing we will be collected, held, and supported at the other end. To be open to finding intimacy is to be open to finding disappointment, to navigate difficult conversations because no matter how challenging, it’s easier than accepting the loss of that person without trying. To bathe in the heat of a laugh so deep it fills the atmosphere with a tang so infectious that together even years later, we can so easily tap back into that moment shared with one that we love in the cushioned hammock of our bond. To accept the respect, trust, responsibility,  knowledge, care and commitment - as described by bell hooks - needed to accept one’s love we must find within ourselves the sunshine that our loved ones so easily see.

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Practical and digital techniques, integral to each of their artist processes, are exchanged and combined in these bodily and ornamental assemblages.

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Cohesion is a new body of work by artists Ibrahim Azab and Josh Moseley, exploring the experience of friendship, practice and play.

Through collaboration, the duo artists investigate notions of connection, separation and presence via the lens and image making processes. Both artists move away and approach each others artistic practice, using the photograph as a space of arrival and departure. Through this act, performances become present whilst simultaneously absent from each other and the camera, forming a visceral understanding of time, space and object whilst bringing together and fragmenting the body, memory and the photograph.

An intimate collection of our hand sculpted and wheel thrown ceramic works from past and present and new unique collaborative pieces by father and daughter Chris Bramble and Freya Bramble- Carter who maintain daily clay sessions, teaching in their London studio at Kingsgate Workshops.

Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck’s (b.1990, France) and Jatinder Singh Durhailay’s (b.1988, England) exhibition encompasses works from their respective oeuvres of the years 2014-2022.

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The parallels in their works have been growing organically and tangibly: by sharing their lives, studio spaces and colour palettes, and by sourcing and at times making natural stone pigments, vegetable dyes and papers together in their daily and on their frequent travels through England, France, India, and Japan. Based in rural England, they move fluidly between diverse visual narratives, material cultures and practices. Their work is shaped particularly by Johanna’s childhood in rural Alsace and Jatinder’s Indian Sikh heritage. Together, their independent practices evolve a circuitous new poetry.

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Blending myths and contemporary culture, Jatinder’s portrayal of the world that surrounds us is humorous, heroic and poignant. While he paints intricate and observant portraits and sceneries in the style of Indian Mughal miniature painting — spanning painterly subjects from the Sikh community to Bruce Lee — Johanna’s practice evokes a polyphonous garden. She looks at plants as models for the colours, materials and organic shapes of her works. In her collages, paintings, drawings, clay sculptures, textile works, films, and photographs, Johanna explores the poetics of space and memory, and plays with their correlations.

Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck and Jatinder Singh Durhailay look closely at the communities and companion species that surround them, and root themselves in their flourishing relations. Time is how you spend your love; this sentiment permeates the exhibition like a rāga.* 

* A rāga (Sanskrit for 'colouring', or 'dyeing') is a melodic framework for improvisation and a central feature in Indian classical music.

HOME presents Bernice Mulenga’s debut solo exhibition; Between Me and You, depicting joyous moments captured on film. Mulenga notes: “As a teenager, I wasn’t documented”. The large-scale photographic images from their series #friendsonfilm, are part of Bernice’s ongoing documentation of their life and the community around them.

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While primarily presenting members of the Black Queer community, the images hint at the underlying issues of the Black British experience. Mulenga’s focus has been predominantly capturing moments, using differing images to reinforce the notion of connection. With the knowledge that memories situate us, help us to navigate our lives more fully thereby engaging in our life experience, Bernice’s pictorial account affords us a way to help deepen the experience. This archival journey, which Bernice began in 2015, is seen as akin to coming of age, growing with time. 

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Alongside Between Me and You, Josh Woolford expands their 2019 performance project ‘What do you see (when I feel what I feel)?’ through an immersive installation, looped videos and three live performances.  

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HOME is proud to present the group exhibition, Collective Processes, to the Gucci Circolo space. These 15 artists represent an impressive breadth of talent and creative practices, spanning photography, sculpture, painting, textiles and videography, with many multidisciplinary artists among the fold. Over the course of the past year these artists have become part of HOME’s extended family in a number of ways. 

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HOME and SAINT OGUN come together to celebrate their joint One Year Anniversaries through a special exhibition and programme, unpacking the word home through a lens on London and its Diaspora connections with the Caribbean and Africa.

A-COLD-WALL*, Ahluwalia, Àrámìdé, Bianca Saunders, FEBEN, Martine Rose, Olubiyi Thomas, Tolu Coker, TSAU, Walé Adeyemi and Wesley Harriott.

Armour brings together eleven Black British Designers in an immersive installation exhibition exploring and celebrating Black garment, craft, and design. Discover archive garments, imagery and more at HOME this Autumn.

Celebrating the end of Cob x HOME Residency, Hannah Lim and Courtenay Welcome present their works, created and developed while sharing a space.

We are interested in how sharing a space can inform the work of two practitioners working across different mediums and from alternate perspectives. This residency is an exploration of how mediums or creative thinking can merge, and the impact this has on both practitioners and viewers. – Ronan Mckenzie, Director of Home.

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“The Self Portrait is a celebration of Black Women photographers, demonstrating the nuance of not only the stories we tell, but the people behind the lens telling them. The show is an acknowledgement of the value of archiving the photographic history of Black photographers in the UK while simultaneously making visible and remembering the people who were at the forefront (or behind the scenes) of that history.” - Ronan Mckenzie, Curator

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Including the works of: Denisha Anderson, Jennie Baptiste, Tino Chiwariro, Christina Ebenezer, Joy Gregory, Adama Jalloh, Olivia Lifungula, Ronan Mckenzie, Christina Nwabugo, Lucie Rox, Amaal Said, Ejatu Shaw and Tori Taiwo.

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In Collaboration with WePresent

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AIN’T I SOFT Is a collection of humanising images of Black women, unframed from the boxes that are usually forcibly used to define their existence in a singular form. The exhibition seeks to challenge the dichotomous logic that being a Black woman cannot be polysemous. Being continuously exposed to the controlling imagery that conclusively portrays women in black skin as stoic beings often deny the space for them to exist in any other form.

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AIN’T I SOFT is the capturing of a small part of the bigger picture to decolonise identity. Not to play into the construct of gender expression but rather a rebellious statement that identity can be made up of a heterogeneous mixture of many definitions of self. What the exhibition hopes to evoke is the exploration of a post-humanist form of thinking that will allow humans to participate in defining themselves to the world as opposed to letting the world define them.

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An exhibition by object to subject, in collaboration with HOME

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HOME presents I See In Colour, the debut solo exhibition by British painter Cece Philips. Existing in the intersection of the real and the imagined, I See In Colour draws inspiration from archival writings, historical photographs and family tales to explore and celebrate the histories of Black figures in Britain.

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The title, a play on the familiar phrase “I don’t see colour”, points to Philips’ use of pigment to inject the painted scenes with vitality and life. Philips’ focus is undeniably on the individuals that populate her paintings, a series of startlingly vibrant figures that stretch across her large-scale canvases against the muted background tones.

HOME presents WATA, Further Explorations, an exhibition bringing together new works from Ronan Mckenzie and Joy Yamusangie. Taking root in Mckenzie and Yamusangie’s first formal collaboration, a short film of the same name produced at the beginning of 2020, WATA weaves together considerations of ancestry, cross cultural connections, music and migration.

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