The exhibition New Worlds — Women to Watch 2024 featuring Noemie Goudal representing the UK will be at NMWA in 2024.
New Worlds / Women to Watch 2024: When women artists envision a different world, how does that look? NMWA invites a close exploration of this question in Women to Watch 2024, the seventh installment of the museum’s exhibition series. It will be the first Women to Watch to be presented in NMWA’s newly renovated exhibition space on the second floor of the museum.
Given the extraordinary events of 2020 and 2021, including a global health pandemic, intense calls for social reform, and unprecedented political division, any contemporary art exhibition planned for three years from this moment will necessarily include work that is impacted by all of these issues. However, rather than focus on recent events as an organizing factor for Women to Watch 2024, we choose instead to look to artists’ visions of a new world. How have our societal conditions impacted artists’ visions for the future or inspired them to create alternative current realities? Whether optimistic or discordant, fantastical or believable, artists have always had a hand in visualizing what could be and, in times of difficulty, have often provided hope––or warning.
Irene Aristizábal, head of curatorial and public practice at BALTIC and co-curator of British Art Show 9, was invited to curate a short list of artists with ties to the UK.
The work of our four shortlisted UK artists (before one is selected to take part in the 2024 exhibition at NMWA) was on view from 4 to 10 February 2023 at Christie’s, 8 King Street. We greatly thank Christie’s for supporting our exhibition and Mezcal Reina for providing drinks for the Vernissage.
Noémie Goudal
Goudal’s practice investigates the complexity of man’s precarious evolving relationship with the natural world, and our quest for an understanding of our place in the universe that stretches from ancient times to modernity. Through the construction of staged sets, and the use of models made of paper, mirrors and wood, Goudal’s oeuvre brings real and imagined geographies into a mysterious synchronicity that gives a new perspective on the issue.
Goudal studied at The Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins. She is represented by Edel Assanti. She was featured at the 2022 Les Rencontres d’ Arles.
Alicia Reyes McNamara
Reyes McNamara’s work is an investigation of folklore and rituals around loss, mourning and healing, in which beings and landscapes mutate and shapeshift, creating a personal imaginary of forms of embodiment. Her practice examines the potential of how all things can transcend their own definition and acquire a new life or meaning.
Reyes McNamara studied at The Oxford Ruskin School of Fine Art and the California College of the Arts. She was featured in the 2022 London Open. Reyes McNamara is represented by Niru Ratnam.
Tai Shani
Shani’s multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. Shani creates violent, erotic and fantastical images told in a dense, floral language which re-imagines feminine otherness as a perfect totality, set in a world complete with cosmologies, myth and histories that negate patriarchal narratives.
Shani is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner and a 2019 Max Mara prize nominee. Her work is on show at Gathering (London) and has been shown at Turner Contemporary, UK (2019); Grazer Kunst Verein, Austria (2019); Glasgow International, UK (2018); Serpentine Galleries, London (2016); Tate, London (2016) and many others.
Alberta Whittle
Whittle works across film, media, performance, and sculpture. Her work is concerned with questioning how history and society are constructed in the Western world. Her practice takes on the legacies of colonialism and slavery and is also concerned with environmental issues such as the climate crisis.
Whittle is the 2020 winner of the Turner Bursary and Frieze Artist Award. She is representing Scotland at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Short Listed Artists
Noémie Goudal
Alicia Reyes McNamara
Tai Shani
Alberta Whittle
