This exhibition traces more than a century of artistic experimentation with the relationship between words and images. It spans early-twentieth-century historical avant-garde practices through post-war developments in concrete poetry to contemporary art.
Disruption operates here on two levels. It is a creative force within the historical avant-gardes and their legacies, as artists move words across surfaces and unsettle the conventions of syntax and image-making. It also speaks to lives shaped by movement: from the forced journeys of those fleeing Nazism, to post-war migration, to second-generation artists navigating between cultures, and to the ongoing question of belonging and resettlement. ‘Wordl’, coined in the spirit of the avant-garde’s restless reshaping of language, fuses ‘word’ and ‘world’. It evokes arrival in the UK by different routes, the acquisition of new languages, the accommodation to a new place, as well as experimentation with new forms, all while reshaping British art. What connects the artists presented here are shared histories of migration and movement, alongside an impulse to disrupt the boundary between reading and viewing, probing questions of belonging, conflict, exile, identity, forced and voluntary journeys, the making of meaning, nostalgia, and origin.
Beginning with the émigré artist Kurt Schwitters and his pioneering collages, the exhibition traces successive waves of migration and the questions they raise. It moves through artists displaced by the Second World War, including Alfred Lomnitz, Hugo Dachinger, Gustav Metzger, and Shmuel Dresner. The word-image experiments in their works, like the pieces throughout this show, belong to a wider tradition that runs from Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams (poetry arranged into visual form) through the experiments of the Cubists, Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, and Surrealists, and their works here continue in that line of using newspapers and scraps of paper. The exhibition then moves to a later generation, among them Henri Chopin, Astrid Furnival, Hansjörg Mayer, John Sharkey, Li Yuan-chia, Susan Hiller, and Verdi Yahooda, who arrived in the UK during the post-war period. Ian Hamilton Finlay and Dom Sylvester Houédard complicate any stable sense of Britishness, while David Medalla, José Maria Cruxent, and Martha Hellion speak to the countercultural energies of the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, Tam Joseph, Hormazd Narielwalla, Astra Papachristodoulou, and Osman Yousefzada bring questions of identity and migration into the present.
This collaborative exhibition brings together works from the Ben Uri and William Allen Collections. We extend our thanks to additional lenders Bernard Moxham and the Chelsea College of Arts Library, as well as to the artists Astra Papachristodoulou and Osman Yousefzada. Ben Uri and William Allen also extend their sincere thanks to a number of contributors. For the exhibition guide, prepared for educational purposes, we are grateful to Nandika Bali, Taylor Beidler, Ariel Finch, Justin Piperger, Ian Robson, and Greg Thomas. We also thank Stephen Bann, Bernard Moxham, Jasia Reichardt, Nicola Simpson, and Andrew Wilson for their valuable insights. We would like to thank David Glasser, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, and Director Cathy Pütz for their support in making this exhibition possible. Special thanks go to the Ben Uri Research and Collections team: Nandika Bali, Silvia Cafaro, Rachel Dickson, Irene Iacono, Alexander Knight, Sarah MacDougall, Michal Mel, Joy Onyejiako, and Masoom Pincha, as well as to the William Allen Collection team: Taylor Beidler and Ariel Finch.
The older generation of avant-garde artists in this room, Kurt Schwitters, Alfred Lomnitz, Hugo Dachinger, Gustav Metzger, and Shmuel Dresner, came to the UK as refugees from Nazism. Schwitters fled Germany for Norway in 1937. Three years later, he reached Edinburgh; soon afterwards, he was interned on the Isle of Man. Lomnitz and Dachinger shared this fate under Winston Churchill’s mass internment policy for so-called ‘enemy aliens’. Lomnitz left Germany for the UK in 1933 after antisemitic laws came into force but was interned in 1940 at Huyton Camp in Liverpool, as was Dachinger, who fled Austria and arrived in England via Denmark in 1938. The youngest in this group, Metzger, born in Germany to Polish parents, arrived in 1939 on the Kindertransport and later became stateless after losing his Polish citizenship. Their works on display continue the avant-garde practice of using everyday materials such as newspapers and printed scraps, while Schwitters also offers a painted view from the internment camp, all while disrupting conventional rules in art. Avant-garde artists rejected conventional aesthetics, embraced experimentation and modernity, and challenged established cultural, social, and political norms.
Another group of artists in this room, Henri Chopin, Astrid Furnival, and Hansjörg Mayer, arrived in the UK after the Second World War and belong to the concrete poetry group, as does Dom Sylvester Houédard (better known as dsh), who arrived earlier. Born in Guernsey, a self-governing Crown Dependency, and connected to his French heritage, dsh shares the same historical moment as the earlier generation. He was evacuated to the UK in 1940 at around 14. Chopin also shares this moment. Born in inter-war Paris, he fled the city in 1940 after the German invasion but was soon deported to forced labour camps and prisons in Central Europe. He returned to France in 1945, completed military service, and settled in England in the 1960s. Furnival left East Germany at a young age with her grandmother and settled in England in the 1950s. Mayer moved to the UK from Germany in 1966 to take up a lecturing post at the Bath Academy of Art, becoming a central figure in British avant-garde publishing and typographic art. In concrete poetry the visual arrangement of words is as important as their semantic meaning, a principle seen throughout the works here, whether text appears on textiles or paper.
Here are also works by artists who arrived in the UK in the 1960s, and who formed part of a counterculture that developed against the backdrop of tightening immigration laws and growing xenophobia. The Filipino-born David Medalla became a vital presence in the UK’s experimental art scene and saw himself not as a migrant but as a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. In 1964, he joined Gustav Metzger, the Italian-born Marcello Salvadori, and others to co-found Signals Gallery in central London. It quickly became an avant-garde space that drew in migrant artists through its internationalist outlook and experimental forms. The Chinese conceptual artist Li Yuan-chia and the Spanish-born Venezuelan artist and archaeologist José María Cruxent were both part of Medalla’s circle. Li arrived in London in 1966 before settling in rural Cumbria, while Cruxent spent a brief period in the city before leaving for Jamaica. Their works here push words and symbols into conceptual, abstract forms that question how reading and viewing operate.
Other concrete poets in this exhibition are Ian Hamilton Finlay and the Irishman John Sharkey, both arriving in the UK by different routes. Finlay was born in Nassau, The Bahamas, to a Scottish family whose wealth derived from orange farming in Florida and alcohol smuggling during Prohibition. Sent to school in Scotland as a child, he later described himself as ‘exiled from his island home’. Many of his works here draw on imagery of the seaside, water, boats, and voyages. Sharkey came to London in 1965 after spending time in Bristol and abandoning his studies in Dublin. Soon after arriving, he participated in Gustav Metzger’s Destruction in Art Symposium and took part in events at the ICA. His work on display here is a rare example of more political concrete poetry.
Another group of artists in this room engages the image-text relationship by rethinking the book as both form and object, either by burning books and pages or reworking them into almost entirely visual forms. Like Finlay and Sharkey, they arrived by different routes and at different moments. John Latham was sent from Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, to the UK for schooling in the mid-1930s. Polish-born Shmuel Dresner arrived in England in 1945 as a teenage refugee and was sent to Windermere with a group of young Holocaust survivors known as ‘The Boys’. In the 1960s, Susan Hiller came to the UK from the USA, while Verdi Yahooda arrived from present-day Yemen with her family.
The lives of the artists whose work is displayed here, and the routes by which they came to the UK, disrupt any stable sense of a quintessential Britishness and ask us to consider why some are more readily ‘othered’, while others are more easily aligned with British culture and art.
Martha Hellion, Tam Joseph, and Verdi Yahooda, alongside Hormazd Narielwalla, Astra Papachristodoulou, and Osman Yousefzada, form an active and contemporary group of artists within this exhibition, extending its concerns into the present. Joseph arrived from Dominica in the 1950s, Yahooda came from present-day Yemen in the early 1960s, and Hellion moved from Mexico to the UK in the late 1960s. Each of their works carries a history shaped by voyages and movements across borders: Joseph, in the reconfiguration of political cartographies; Hellion, in her engagement with travel documents and shifting identities; and Yahooda, through a quiet reworking of personal memory from a different place.
Narielwalla, Papachristodoulou, and Yousefzada, a younger generation of artists in this exhibition, sharpen this enquiry through a more overt fracturing of language and form. Narielwalla, born in India and based in the UK since 2003, cuts photographs and tailoring patterns into layered compositions that bind personal and historical displacement. Papachristodoulou, who arrived from Greece in 2009, works through text, colour, and pattern to probe identity and conflict. Yousefzada, born in the UK to a Pakistani-Afghan family, brings together invented script and the body to reflect on voyage, identity, and migration.
From the legacy of the historical avant-gardes to the present day, this exhibition brings together works that test the limits of language and image against the background of histories of movement, resettlement, and first- and second-generation migration in the UK, drawing together different worlds and the words that carry them. It shows how early twentieth-century experimental forms continued to evolve across changing social conditions. What binds these works is a shared refusal of fixity, in which the word-image border remains open.
Dr. Ana-Maria Milčić, Curator
