Galleries Curate | RHE

Galleries Curate: RHE is the opening exhibition and website for an international collaboration between contemporary art galleries around the world, brought together by the Covid-19 pandemic to share a dialogue between their programmes. The exhibition opens 4th January 2021 and will continue in stages, with works added by participating galleries until May 2021.

In the first days of the Covid-19 pandemic, an informal group of contemporary galleries from around the world came together to discuss how to navigate through the new challenges of the global crisis as it affected our artists, staff and businesses. The relationships among us over weeks of exchange became close and essential and we discovered that while the pandemic had broken many things apart, it had also brought us together. A supportive sense of community ignited positivity and cooperative interactions, and the initial group of twelve grew to twenty-one. As an expression of this unity, we initiated Galleries Curate, a collaborative exhibition designed to express the dynamic dialogue between our individual programmes.

Galleries Curate: RHE is the first chapter of this collaboration, an exhibition and website themed around a universal and, we hope, unifying subject: water. Like culture, water is never static but always in flux. Following the inaugural exhibition RHE, Galleries Curate plan to invite new participants and add further curated chapters to a global conversation of thematic relationships between galleries, artists, and their audiences.

RHE (from Greek for that which flows) is a platform for exhibitions, performances, and public interventions that loosely address the theme of water—geographically, politically, economically or metaphorically. Involving projects with twenty-one galleries, both online and on-site, RHE was conceived to span regions, markets, cultures, and audiences around the world, circulating both within and outside of traditional white-box exhibition spaces.

RHE’s first project will launch on January 4th, 2021, with an online presentation of works by Francis Alÿs, Giovanni Anselmo, and Latifa Echakhch, extending the exhibition A buoy if not a beacon, currently on view at Jan Mot in Brussels. Conceived during the spring lockdown, RHE’s inaugural project explores the politics and poetics of water in relation to the perception of time. Continuing in stages through May 2021, additional projects will be added by participating galleries each month.

In addition to hosting online exhibitions, RHE’s digital platform will be a living archive of materials related to the works on view, offering a growing variety of texts and reference materials for each of the projects. As new materials are added, past and present projects will intermix—informing, counterbalancing, and recontextualizing each other and making a virtue of the broad dimension of the GALLERIES CURATE collaboration.

Participating Galleries

A Gentil Carioca (Rio de Janeiro)

Blum & Poe (Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo)

Sadie Coles HQ (London)

Chantal Crousel (Paris)

Experimenter (Kolkata)

Peter Freeman, Inc. (New York, Paris)

Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town, London)

Galerie Lelong & Co (Paris, New York)

kurimanzutto (Mexico City, New York)

Take Ninagawa (Tokyo)

Tanya Leighton (Berlin)