Serpentine Gallery · Kensington
Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing
Justin Caguiat's first major UK exhibition brings together painting, sculpture, printmaking, sound and film in a site-responsive installation, including thermochromic paintings that shift with heat and light and bronze bells that ring in continually changing sequences.
Preview: written before the show opened
Bronze bells cast as flowers and plant seeds are installed through Serpentine South, struck by pistons on a loop that follows the rules of English change ringing, to a score by Lily Pickett. When they ring, they trigger heating pads behind copper panels painted with heat-sensitive pigment, and the pictures shift colour and form.
This is the Tokyo-born artist's first UK institutional show. Alongside the thermochromic panels are large paintings that evoke murals and landscapes, prints, sculpture, and a 16mm film shown in a small cinema built in a rarely used space at the back of the gallery. The panels also react to the room's own temperature, so what you see depends on the day.
The idea is that the building itself listens: the walls gather and amplify the chimes, the way Britain's concrete coastal acoustic mirrors were built to hear warships coming. Entry is free.
Editor's pick
The paintings are thermochromic, so their colour shifts with the room's heat and light, while bronze bells ring in ever-changing sequences, what English bell-ringers call change ringing. Justin Caguiat's first major UK show, free in Kensington Gardens.
Look for
The thermochromic copper panels
Heat-sensitive paintings that change colour when the bells set off their heating pads, or when the room warms up.
The flower bells
Bronze bells in the shapes of flowers and seeds, rung by pistons in Lily Pickett's continuous change-ringing score.
The back-room cinema
A 16mm film by Caguiat, screened in a small cinema made from a seldom-used space at the back of the building.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Locals Who've Seen It All
