Rita Keegan’s first solo exhibition in more than fifteen years features artworks that reflect the intersection of new media experimentation, feminist practice and the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s.
Combining digital animation, textiles, painting and copy art with experiential media such as scent, Keegan’s tactile practice grapples with the elusive and enduring powers of memory, often drawing on her extensive family archive: a photographic record of a Black middle-class Canadian family from the 1880s to present day. With these images, Keegan charts the politics of dress, adornment and self-definition, bringing this personal history to bear on self-portraits and conceptual clothing that create affirmative and complex representations of Black female identity. As Keegan articulated in a 1987 interview; ‘What else do we have? We have no property, no money, no bodies of our own. We have to work from ourselves and speaking from my own experience it is not easy for large, Black, women to celebrate ourselves!’
Alongside paintings and copy art collages – some never previously exhibited – will be a new mixed-media installation revisiting the work Cycles (1992) originally presented at the Bluecoat, Liverpool as part of Trophies of Empire curated by Keith Piper.
| Duration | 17 September 2021 - 28 November 2021 |
| Times | Tues-Sun 11am-6pm (Wed until 9pm) |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | South London Gallery |
| Address | 65 Peckham Road, London, SE5 8UH |
| Contact | 020 7703 6120 / mail@southlondongallery.org / www.southlondongallery.org |