Arnolfini announces major exhibitions from three female artists

Arnolfini will be hosting a programme of exhibitions from three very different female artists in 2022. From intimate documentary photography to etchings and lithography, and sculptural installations to bindi drawings, Bristol 24/7 takes a look at what is to come.

Polly Braden – Holding the Baby

Originally created by Musuem of the Home, London (curated by Sinéad McCarthy), documentary photographer Polly Braden’s exhibition Holding the Baby will transfer to Bristol in February, following shows in London and Liverpool.

The impetus for Braden’s series of quietly intimate, participatory photographs of single parent families was a United Nations report in 2019 by Philip Alston into the effects of austerity. His analysis was that single parents were worst affected.

Over a two year period, Braden worked closely with single parents including Fran, Jahanara, Charmaine, Aaron, Barbeline, Caroline, Gemma, Carike and their families to accurately depict a sense of their “adventure, optimism, creativity, ambition and resilience” – traits, Braden says, that transcended the challenges of their daily lives.

“Having become a single parent myself,” she reflects, “I started to look at some of the prejudices and policies that impact the parent who stayed.”

Jana with Izaan and Yaana – photo: Polly Braden

The images were made in a collaborative way, sometimes with the parents taking them themselves. The photographs will be excerpts from interviews from journalist Sally Williams, and words collated by Claire-Louise Bennett from single parents detailing their experiences on ‘the favourite thing in their home’.

The project has received funding from Arts Council England and Grain, and is supported by the single parent family charity Gingerbread, and CPAG (Child Poverty Action Group).

To coincide with the exhibition, there will be a pop-up version at Baraka Café in Easton (dates to be confirmed).

Barbeline and Elijah – photo: Polly Braden

Polly Braden exhibition dates are February 19-May 2022 (end date to be confirmed early 2022), Tuesday to Sunday, 11am-6pm.

Paula Rego

Internationally esteemed printmaker, sculptor, and painter Dame Paula Rego RA is a major figurative artist of her generation, known for her magical realism and her extraordinary imagination.

Nearly four decades after her first exhibition at the gallery in 1982-83, in February 2022 Arnolfini will welcome back the Portugese-British artist, presenting over 70 prints spanning her illustrious career.

Wendy and Hook (from Peter Pan series, 1992) – image: Paula Rego

In the intervening years, she has won a multitude of plaudits, exhibitions, residencies and retrospectives, including London’s Serpentine Gallery, National Gallery and Tate Britain, as well as the opening of The Casa das Histórias in her birth country of Portugal – a museum permanently housing her personal collection of prints and drawings.

Today, Rego’s work is held in public and private collections around the world. In this collection, etchings, screen prints and lithographic prints will be on show, and at play across the work there are recurrent themes of ‘power, rebellion, sexuality and gender, grief and poverty’ – most often through the female gaze.

Feeding Time (from O Vinho series, 2007) image: Paula Rego

Paula Rego exhibition dates are February 5-May 29 2022.

Bharti Kher

After her degree in Fine Art in 1991, London-born Bharti Kher moved to New Delhi, India, in 1993. In the three decades since, she has risen to prominence as one of the country’s most esteemed contemporary artists.

Working across scales and mediums, Kher’s visual language will be put front and centre of her exhibition at Arnolfini, arriving in October 2022.

Her aesthetic is is one in which ‘drawing, sculpture and installation intertwine, straddling two cultures but speaking one visual language’. As she puts it: “I speak my own hand-brain-body-art language. I hear it, taste it, eat it, write it, draw it”.

Following residences at the renowned gallery Hauser & Worth in 2017 and 2019, this exhibition will be a very welcome return to the South West, and will feature some never-before seen mixed media drawings created during her time in Somerset.

Bharti Kher, from the ‘Spell drawing’ series, 2019 – photo: Dominic Brown Photography

There are also sculptures, her richly textured bindi drawings, showing “a language that you know but that you cannot read” – and a site-specific iteration of Virus, which the artist remakes every year as part of a 30-year on-site project.

Portrait, Sonia Bharti Kher 2013 (Sari, resin, concrete) – photo: Claire Dorn

Bharti Kher exhibition dates are October 22 2022-January 29, 2023.

Arnolfini is at 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol, BS1 4QA, and exhibitions will be open Tuesday-Sunday, 11am-6pm. All exhibitions are free and will be bookable in advance, though walk-ins may be available on the day. More information is available at www.arnolfini.org.uk.

Main photo: Polly Braden

Read more: Major retrospective for Bristol-born Stephen Gill

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