The Place Is Here The starting-point for this exhibition is a pivotal decade for British culture and politics: the 1980s. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, film and archives, The Place Is Here brings together a wide range of works by more than 30 artists and collectives. The questions they ask – about identity, representation and what culture is for – remain vital today. In 1982, a group of artists and thinkers met in Wolverhampton at the First National Black Art Convention, to discuss the ‘form, future and function of Black Art’. Two years later, the second ‘working convention’ took place here in Nottingham. What constitutes ‘black art’, or the ‘Black Arts Movement’ was, and continues to be, heavily contested. This exhibition traces some of the urgent conversations that were taking place between black artists, writers and thinkers during the 80s. Against a backdrop of civil unrest and divisive national politics, they were exploring their relationship to Britain’s colonial past as well as to art history. Many artists were looking to the Civil Rights movement in America, Black …

“The very conditions that make the State possible… trace creative lines of escape” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Nomadology: The War Machine, 1986) Lisson Gallery presents the first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom by Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili. Based between Berlin, Oslo and Paris, Khalili’s work explores the broad topics of migration and displacement through the mediums of film, video, installation, photography and prints. Largely inspired by the idea of journeys, both literally and conceptually, Khalili’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery lays bare the socially constructed nature of borders and challenges our fixed ideas of identity and nationhood.  Nowhere do the concepts of movement, identity and borders align more poignantly than in Khalili’s multi-channel video installation The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11). Aiming to draw an alternative practice of map-making, the work consists of eight films that focus the audience’s gaze on the tortuous and complex journeys taken by individuals forced to cross borders illegally. These journeys are literally traced onto a large map seen on screen, while the narrators recount the journey factually, …

Sonia Boyce: We move in her way Sonia Boyce presents a new body of work created especially for the ICA.  We move in her way involves the exploratory vocal and movement performances of Elaine Mitchener, Barbara Gamper and her dancers Eve Stainton, Ria Uttridge and Be van Vark, with an invited audience. A multi-media installation has been generated from the documentation of their open-ended live performance. The title of the work suggests two possible readings: that ‘she’ dictates our movements; or that we obstruct ‘hers’, with both interpretations suggesting power is at play. Boyce has a participatory art practice where she invites others to engage performatively with improvisation. In this process, she encourages contributors to exercise their own responses to the situations she enables, where she steps back from any directorial position to observe the activities and dynamics of exchange as they unfold. Once the performance is played out and documented, Boyce reshapes the material generated, in what she calls “recouping the remains”, to create the artwork as a multi-media installation. We move in her way was created in this way as a performative …