‘Disruptors: Fractured Images and Migrant Wordl’ is a collaborative exhibition bringing together works from the Ben Uri and William Allen Collections, and additional lenders.
This exhibition traces more than a century of experiment in word-image relations, spanning early twentieth-century historical avant-garde practice to post-war developments in concrete poetry and conceptual art. What connects these works is a shared impulse to disrupt the boundary between reading and viewing, producing effects that range from cryptic symbols to direct anti-establishment statements, while probing questions of movement, migration, exile, nostalgia, belonging, conflict, identity, origin, and meaning-making.
Disruption here operates on two levels. It begins as a creative force within the historical avant-gardes and the paths that followed, 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, and the forging of new relationships between word and image, while reshaping the British art world.
Beginning with Kurt Schwitters, whose pioneering collages and poems fractured conventional boundaries between image and word, the exhibition traces successive waves of migration and shifting questions of belonging. It moves through artists displaced by the Second World War, including Alfred Lomnitz, Hugo Dachinger, Gustav Metzger, and Shmuel Dresner. A later generation, among them Henri Chopin, Astrid Furnival, Hansjörg Mayer, John Sharkey, Li Yuan-chia, Susan Hiller, and Verdi Yahooda, arrived in the UK in the post-war period. Ian Hamilton Finlay and Dom Sylvester Houédard complicate any stable sense of Britishness and belonging, 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 belonging into the present.
Part of Ben Uri's longstanding ethos is to explore how migration shapes British art through the work of the Ben Uri Research Unit. The fractured words and fractured worlds of Disruptors resonate today with renewed urgency.
