Want the World to Know, Saatchi Gallery

Micheal Forbes' solo show at the Saatchi Art Gallery opened in Summer 2023 and builds upon his solo show at the Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre at the University of Nottingham (2022). 

 

Forbes works with sculpture, installation, photography and digital media to explore themes of racial politics, migration, history, and religion, through a lens that challenges us to examine the dichotomy of blackness and whiteness. Want the World to Know features Forbes’ monumental totemic sculptures, which incorporate mannequins bound, cocoon-like, in black PVC. The resulting works are bulging forms whose taut skins point to rising political tensions which threaten to tear through. Forbes use of lifejackets alludes to political and humanitarian events as well as religious dogma.

The exhibition features text-based works which utilise the slogans of demonstrators in the 2020 BLM protests. Through these polemical works, Forbes poses vital questions about the demonisation, fetishisation, and control of the Black body.

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Curator and longtime collaborator Rebecca Blackwood, founder of OMC, also contributed an essay to the exhibition entitled 'Want the Whites to Know'.