The neologism Wordl fuses the words word and world. It is coined in the spirit of the avant-garde’s restless reconfiguration of language. At once playful and unsettling, Wordl collapses the ideas of migration, suggesting both the experience of arriving in a new world and being changed by that world and vice versa. It also evokes the slips and language errors of immigrants and non-native speakers as they navigate a linguistic universe that is never fully settled. Disruption here is twofold. It is a creative force within avant-garde art, redefining the traditional relationship between words and images by displacing text from its usual linear order, letting it migrate across the canvas, and in turn pushing images beyond their customary boundaries. Disruption is also the lived experience of migration, where language and identity are unsettled and remade. The exhibition highlights how first- and second-generation immigrants to the UK forged new visual forms that blurred the line between what counts as a word and what appears as an image, while also exploring deeper questions of belonging.
Disruptors: Fractured Images and Migrant Wordl is a collaborative exhibition featuring works from the Ben Uri and William Allen Collections. It explores how avant-garde and modernist artists disrupted conventions not only in art and language but in belonging itself. The exhibition opens with Kurt Schwitters, whose pioneering collages and poems in the early twentieth century fractured traditional boundaries between image and word. His practice of disruption sets the tone for the works that follow, where artists continued to challenge linguistic norms, fragment meaning and question how text might operate visually. Through works drawn from the two collections, Disruptors traces a line from the historical avant -gardes to the neo-avant-gardes of the post-war period, including the rise of concrete poetry and conceptual practices.
The works on display consider migration in multiple registers. Some take the form of conceptual experiments with image and text, while others speak directly to lived journeys of exile and displacement. Together they show how the radical experiments and shared experience of migration from the pre-war to the post-war period. From Kurt Schwitters, Alfred Lomnitz and Hugo Dachinger to Gustav Metzger, José Maria Cruxent and David Medalla the exhibition showcases pioneers who carried their fractured histories into fractured forms. Astrid Furnival, Li-Yuan Chia, Hansjörg Mayer, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Henri Chopin push language into abstraction, sound and symbol. John Latham’s altered books and Samuel Dresner’s meditations on exile reconfigure the authority of text, while Tom Joseph and Hormazd Narielwalla create maps and patterns that redraw cultural belonging. The exhibition also considers Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose interweaving of word and image remains a singular touchstone.
Part of Ben Uri’s longstanding ethos is to explore how migration has shaped, and continues to shape, the social fabric of the UK. Disruptors reflects this mission, presenting artists whose works not only reinvent the relationship between image and text but also bear witness to the transformative power of migration in modern and contemporary culture. Their fractured words and fractured worlds resonate today with urgent clarity.
