Theaster Gates designs the Serpentine Pavilion 2022

Adopting an increasingly polycentric and global geographic approach, in recent years the Serpentine’s Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist has commissioned emerging talent rather than established names. Last year, the pavilion was designed by South African Sumaya Vally, founder of Counterspace; the year before, it was Frida Escobedo and Diébédo Francis Kéré.

This year, the choice falls on Theaster Gates, a Chicago artist and urban planner whose profile perfectly fits the hybrid, constantly-shifting intersection between design and art typical of the Serpentine’s pavilions.

Gates is a sculptor, ceramicist and performer, a theorist and an activist. He has exhibited or made performances everywhere (from Documenta 13 to the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Palais de Tokyo and the Prada Foundation). Above all, through the Rebuild Foundation he is involved in recovering abandoned spaces for marginalized African American and other communities. Gates’ artistic work explores the concept of “Black space”, which he describes as a “formal exercise defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist.”

Black space is as physical as it is cultural, as may be seen from his works “Plantation Lullabies” (2017), a collection of 4000 pieces of what the artist defines as “negrobilia” (coins, figurines, sheet music, etc.), or “Black Vessel”, staged at the Gagosian gallery in New York in 2020, centring on the overlapping themes of manual labour and maternal love, or the project to transform the Liverpool docks where, together with the Asif Khan Studio, David Adyaje and Mariam Kamara, Gates is creating an International Museum of Slavery to add to this urban space the previously removed history of slavery and trafficking that, after starting in the colonies, ended up on the docks of Britain’s cities.