Hales Gallery is delighted to announce If I told Her, a solo exhibition of work by Andrea Geyer at Hales London. This is Geyer’s first show with the gallery, and will coincide with a second exhibition of Geyer’s work opening at the Hales Project Room in New York later in 2018.
Geyer’s critically-oriented work ranges across media, incorporating text, photography, painting, sculpture, video and performance. It explores the complex politics of time, in the context of specific social and political situations, cultural institutions and historical events. From her early investigations into urban environments and notions of citizenship to more recent research into women’s contributions to modernism, Geyer’s work continuously seeks to create spaces of critical, collective reflection on the construction of histories and ideas that are otherwise marginalised or obscured.
The focus of this exhibition is a core strand of Geyer’s practice, which originated during the artist’s 2012–13 research fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art New York, consisting of an ongoing investigation into women who have actively shaped today’s cultural landscape and contemporary museums. During this research, Geyer began uncovering a vast network of woman-identified philanthropists, collectors, museum directors, artists, poets, political and social visionaries, and activists. Following their traces revealed collaborative activity across boundaries of class and race, at the intersection of culture and politics, without which it became clear the significant shifts of Modernism would never have occurred: an early history that has been rendered largely invisible by a predominantly white patriarchy that have imagined the mainstream of American Modernism.
Together, the works in If I Told Her provide a creative study of and response to the rich stories – the life, work, and legacy – of the cultural pioneers whose voices have been silenced by history. In Geyer’s words: ‘My work aims to locate those silences in people and places to work in and against them … past the silencing machine. To offer new forms of listening, of moving. Here my stumbling is dance, my grunting is proclamation. And viewing is radically practiced affinity.’
