White Cube Mason’s Yard is pleased to present ‘Oh, The Wind Oh, The Wind’, an exhibition of new works by Theaster Gates. Forming part of a multi-venue presentation in London dedicated to Gates’ involvement with clay, it coincides with ‘A Clay Sermon’ at Whitechapel Gallery and a two-year-long research project and intervention with the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection. The full clay project will culminate with a presentation at the Serpentine Pavilion, London, in June 2022.
Treating the medium of clay as an expanded field for enquiry, the exhibition consolidates many of the artist’s thematic preoccupations from the past two decades, and reflects upon Gates’ own identity in relation to this ancient and earthly material. As he says: ‘Clay made me and is forever the root of my artistic interest, but I don't feel limited by any origin story to work solely within the confines of my origins. Blackness, clay, immateriality, and space are all launch pads that encourage advanced practice, reflection, trial, and iteration. I am practising acts of creation.’
The exhibition as a whole takes its title from Gates’ new film Oh, The Wind (2021), presented in the lower-ground floor gallery. Evoking the Black sermon and Baptist hymnody as a way of connecting Black religious music traditions to the history of ceramics, it was filmed in an abandoned conveyance structure for a brick manufacturing company – a site of intense ceramic production for over 50-years and now part of the Archie Bray Foundation. Standing in the building’s cloistered space, the artist sings an improvised hymn, musing on wind and fire, to an invisible congregation. Poetically reinvesting the abandoned building with a powerful, living presence, the film connects the theme of nature in Chinese poetry and Buddhist thought with the Black sermon.