Serpentine Announces Lauren Halsey’s First UK Exhibition

Serpentine has announced the first ever UK exhibition of LA-based artist, Lauren Halsey, who will transform the Serpentine South gallery into an immersive funk garden with a site-specific installation responding to Kensington Gardens. Titled emajendat and beginning on 4 October 2024 and ending on 2 March 2025, the exhibition builds on several recent major projects including the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (l), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden Commission, New York (2023) and keepers of the krown at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) where the artist reconfigured the form of the Hathoric column by carving the capitals with the likenesses and stories of people from her local community. Both of these projects offer increasingly ambitious architectural schemes that engage with their surroundings while functioning as testing grounds for Halsey’s ultimate ambition to create a public sculpture park sited in South Central Los Angeles.

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, 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. At once radical and collaborative, Halsey’s practice extends to Summaeverythang, the community centre she founded in 2019 that is ‘dedicated to the empowerment and transcendence of Black and Brown folks socio-politically, economically, intellectually and artistically.’

Bettina Korek, CEO, Serpentine, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine, say: “It’s an honour to present Lauren Halsey’s first institutional exhibition in the UK. Her work epitomises Serpentine’s mission of building connections between artists and audiences and brings to fruition a yearlong artistic bridge between London and Los Angeles. Incorporating sand, plants, light and sound, this commission is one of the artist’s most ambitious installations to date. By archiving and remixing the changing signs and symbols of her community, Halsey offers a celebratory and creative form of resistance to its growing gentrification. Sharing this work with new audiences in London is a perfect example of Serpentine’s mission to platform voices that deserve full attention today.”

Reflecting on the way in which South Central’s improvisational backyard culture thrives despite a lack of green spaces in the city, emajendat, offers an extension of the park into the galleries.

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. Designed by ALASKA ALASKA, the London-based design studio founded by Virgil Abloh in 2017, it will bring together new and insightful contributions from poet Will Alexander; art historian LeRonn Brooks; musician and founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic, George Clinton; writer, dancer and experimental filmmaker Harmony Holiday; poet and performer Douglas Kearney; and Serpentine CEO Bettina Korek. Generously illustrated in colour throughout, it also features an extensive conversation between Halsey and Serpentine’s Chief Curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas and Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Lauren Halsey: emajendat is curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Director of Programmes (interim) and Chief Curator and Chris Bayley, Exhibitions Curator; and produced by Mike Gaughan, Gallery Manager.