Art on the Underground revealed their 2023 programme which includes major new commissions by Monster Chetwynd, Barby Asante and Jem Perruch.
Responding to London Underground as a constantly changing site of multiple histories, communities, actions and reactions, the 2023 programme will present new works that address this daily reality through performance, sound, visual and sculptural interventions.
Art on the Underground’s 2023 programme features major commissions situated across London including:
- A major project with British artist and Turner Prize nominee Monster Chetwynd along the 60-metre-long disused platform at Gloucester Road station on 18th May 2023
- Barby Asante will develop her seminal work ‘Declaration of Independence’, with a major performance in September 2023 at Stratford station
- For his first international public commission, Italian artist Jem Perucchini will create a new artwork for Brixton station in November 2023
- American artist Sharon Hayes and British artist and photographer Joy Gregory will create new commissions for the pocket Tube Map
- The launch of a series of artist-led collaborations with the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) Community Spaces at Risk Team, bringing new audio works to the city. The first commission in the summer of 2023 will be with Shenece Oretha Canadian-Korean artist Zadie Xa will create new work for Aldgate East Tube station in March 2023 which focuses on the mythologies of the Tube environment, in dialogue with her installation at the neighbouring The Whitechapel Gallery
In May 2023, Art on the Underground launches an ambitious, multifaceted commission with Turner-prize nominated artist Monster Chetwynd at Gloucester Road Tube station. The project comprises a 60-metre-long sculptural installation featuring three dimensional creatures including frogs, salamanders, tortoises and tadpoles and a new film. Known for her joyous and irreverent artworks, Chetwynd takes as her starting point the engineering feat of the Crystal Palace, built in 1851, and its design by gardener turned architect Joseph Paxton.
A major commission with Barby Asante will work with Transport for London (TfL) station colleagues on a new iteration of Asante’s seminal performative artwork, Declaration of Independence. Declaration of Independence is an ongoing performance/forum that brings together a group of women and non-binary people to reflect on how the political affects the personal, considering how the social and cultural implications of historic declarations, policies and legislations impact on their everyday lives. Asante will develop the project through working with a range of TfL operational staff in a series of writing and creative workshops that will produce a collective script for a new Declaration of Independence. This script will be performed by the artist and the collective of station staff to an audience of thousands at Stratford station, with visual outcomes at both Stratford and Notting Hill Gate in September 2023. This collaborative, performative and dialogic work will be Asante’s first major commission in public space and will draw on her ongoing commitment to the politics of place, space, memory and the histories and legacies of colonialism.
For his first major public commission, Jem Perucchini will create a new artwork for Brixton Tube station, launching in November 2023. Through his distinctive painting style Perucchini’s practice conjures Early Renaissance art; his works are like windows into a parallel world, with luminous light, ethereal figures and a meditative quality which will be reflected in this new mural. Moreover, it questions hierarchies, identities and histories. Jem Perucchini’s superimposition of references underscores how history can be seen and interpreted from multiple viewpoints. He will be the seventh artist in the series of commissions at Brixton Tube station since 2018 with the programme inviting artists to respond to the diverse narratives of the local murals painted in the 1980s, the rapid development of the area and the wider social and political history of mural making.
For the 38th pocket Tube map commission, American artist Sharon Hayes will examine UK and London-based newspaper archives and the history of LGBTQ+ activism and protest in the UK. Using collage, Hayes will explore the differing elements of language as it is disseminated and re-disseminated across time and space. Hayes’s work considers the political resistance of words and invites the viewer into the intimate and radical politics of common understanding. An expansion of Hayes’s Tube map commission will be on view in poster sites at Holland Park Tube station from May 2023.
Joy Gregory will take on the pocket Tube map commission for its 39th iteration. Gregory is a London-based artist and photographer whose work explores gender, identity, race, social history, marginalised cultures and lost languages. Renowned for her influence on the Black British photography and social justice movements of the 1980s and 90s, Gregory uses photographic media to re-create forgotten cultural, historical and political narratives. For her pocket Tube map commission, Gregory is interested in exploring the unique context and reach of TfL, its communities and staff, and their creative lives drawing on her camera-less photographic techniques and most recently, her work with embroidered textiles to re-imagine historical narratives around the role of women.
Working with the GLA’s Community Spaces at Risk Team, London-based multidisciplinary artist Shenece Oretha will work closely with a number of community spaces in London to produce collective audio artworks to be heard in London Underground spaces and the communities around stations. This new commission will invite people to think about and appreciate listening and sound as an embodied and collective practice.
Canadian-Korean artist Zadia Xa will create new work for Aldgate East Tube station in March 2023 which focuses on mythologies of the Tube environment and history, expanding on themes and ideas from her commissioned exhibition at the neighbouring Whitechapel Gallery that draws inspiration from diverse fields such as ecology, science-fiction and folklore. For Aldgate East, Xa will specifically look at the historical use by TfL of the mythical Griffin used as an official symbol by London Transport in 1933 and as part of the public face of the organisation up to at least the late 1950s. Xa’s work, launching on 21 March 2023, imagines the Griffin as a guardian at the entrance of Aldgate East and acts as a custodian of the station or a gate-line sentry.
Eleanor Pinfield, Head of Art on the Underground, commented:
Bringing leading international artists to the spaces of London Underground, the 2023 programme invites a focus on the collective experience of the Tube environment, exploring the imaginary and physical terrain of the spaces we travel through every day. These major new artworks re-cast the Tube as a site for collective voices, for contemplation and revelation and for the retelling of stories. The 2023 programme brings unmissable artworks to the city, encouraging us all to explore and enjoy what London has to offer.
