Curated by Emily Gray

Join us for the preview of Not an Archive, three new commissions by Kobby Adi, Celia-Yunior, and Suzanne van der Lingen, responding to the dispersed and ephemeral history of New Contemporaries – a platform for graduating artists that stretches over seven decades.

Piecing together this extensive but scattered history, Celia-Yunior reflect on the pressures of competing in an ever more complex and populated field through assessing the seven decades of New Contemporaries selectors. Suzanne van der Lingen examines the fragmented archival documentation, echoing the dispersal of these new contemporaries within the larger matrix of the arts in Britain. Kobby Adi, who was selected by Keith Piper for the 2019 exhibition, follows Piper through his archives from his participation as a ‘New Contemporary’ in 1986. Their work probes the lure of the archive, as compelling, and at times opaque, as New Contemporaries itself.