The fourth recipient of the annual £100,000 Freelands Award is The Hepworth Wakefield who will present a major survey exhibition with artist Hannah Starkey.
Starkey’s forthcoming exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, running from 20 October 2022 – 30 April 2023, will be her first ever major solo institutional exhibition, presenting a survey of Starkey’s art at a critical time in her career. In addition, Starkey will create a new body of work exploring the shifting female identities within communities that were once strongly defined by coal mining and industrial manufacturing. The Hepworth Wakefield is a museum that specialises in commissioning and presenting contemporary female artists in dialogue with 20th-century modernism. The Hepworth is therefore particularly well placed to present Starkey’s work to a wide audience and enrich the experience of it through the gallery’s art historical and geographic context.
The exhibition will also be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph.
Elisabeth Murdoch, Founder and Chair of Freelands Foundation:
‘The Foundation and I are very excited to work with The Hepworth Wakefield on this timely exhibition of Hannah Starkey’s work. The judging panel concurred that the project presented by the museum and the artist tackles prescient and important current issues, such as education and youth identity. Starkey’s photography brings into focus the complex ways in which female representation and subjectivity play out in contemporary society. The upcoming exhibition presents a fantastic opportunity for both local and international audiences to delve deep into her practice; and the new collaborative project will allow Hannah to create impactful new work that is inextricably tied to the local communities.’
Simon Wallis, Director of The Hepworth Wakefield:
‘We are delighted and honoured to have won the Freelands Award 2019 with photographer Hannah Starkey. Awards of this size are rare, and so important in such an uncertain and challenging financial climate. It will allow us to present the first major survey of work by Starkey and to engage our diverse audience with a significant new commission to be created in Wakefield. Starkey’s emotionally evocative body of work created over the last twenty years, subtly explores how women are represented in contemporary culture and, more recently, their increasingly effective and powerful political activism that is fruitfully changing society and its entrenched attitudes. This long overdue survey of Starkey’s work builds on The Hepworth’s reputation for curating important exhibitions of photographs and extends our commitment to regularly showing work by major female artists. This project comes at an exciting moment when Starkey is reassessing her art in the light of recent political events, such as the MeToo movement, that have such a vital bearing on her new work.’
Selected Artist, Hannah Starkey
Born in Belfast in 1971, Hannah Starkey now lives and works in London. With her work, Starkey explores the physical and psychological connections between the female individual and her everyday urban surroundings. Though her photographs can initially appear to be in the vein of observational documentary, they are in fact deftly choreographed. Often, she reimagines her observations from public environments, using actors to re-enact moments of reverie, togetherness, or fleeting interactions.
Throughout her career, Starkey’s focus has evolved in line with shifts in the political climate and her own life. In her most recent work – which includes images of the Women’s March in London in 2017, and as yet unshown images of the Extinction Rebellion protests and climate change strikes by school children – she explores how to represent a new generation of women at a time when the issues she has been addressing throughout her career are finally centre-stage.
Now in her mid-forties and having recently published a monograph detailing the past two decades of her work, this exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield represents a moment of reassessment for Starkey. She is interested in moving beyond the production of images that quietly but insistently interrogate the subject of women’s representation to something that enters into a more direct dialogue with the world itself, one in which women are agents as well as spectators. The project at The Hepworth Wakefield will allow Starkey to explore some of the issues facing young women today. Collaborating with a group of young women in Wakefield, Starkey will create images with them that explore their experiences of the city and help them better understand the way in which photographic images are constructed, a medium they are using increasingly to shape their own identities. Starkey intends the project to provide young women with the tools to critically examine contemporary visual culture in order to regain control of their representation within it.
Starkey is represented by Maureen Paley in London and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York.
Hannah Starkey, Image: Courtesy of Jeff Moore
Selection Panel
Elisabeth Murdoch, Chair, Founder of Freelands Foundation
Jenni Lomax, Curator and former Director of Camden Art Centre
Martin Clark, Director, Camden Art Centre
Juliana Engberg, Curator and Writer
Alison Wilding, Artist
Shortlist
Firstsite, Colchester
John Hansard Gallery, Southampton
The MAC, Belfast
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne
The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield
The 2018 Freelands Award winner was Spike Island who presented Along a Spectrum from 19 May to Sunday 5 September 2021, Veronica Ryan's largest and most ambitious solo exhibition to date.
The Freelands Award was won in 2017 by Nottingham Contemporary who presented a major exhibition with artist Lis Rhodes, open from 25 May – 25 August 2019. A publication accompanied the exhibition.
The inaugural Freelands Award was won by The Fruitmarket Gallery in 2016 with Glasgow-based artist Jaqueline Donachie. The culminating solo exhibition was open from 11 November 2017 to 11 February 2018. A monograph publication of Donachie’s work and practice accompanied the exhibition.
