Simone Leigh at Turner Contemporary

Simone Leigh has spent more than 20 years exploring Black female subjectivity. Her practice across sculpture, video and installation includes works that merge the female form with architectural structures and materials to draw attention to histories that have often been overlooked or erased.

These two recent sculptures focus on women’s unacknowledged acts of work, community and care. They demonstrate Leigh’s ongoing interest in African diasporic aesthetics, vernacular architecture, and the idea of the body as a vessel, or metaphor for shelter and refuge.

Bisi (2023) honours the late Nigerian curator Bisi Silva (1962–2019), whose vision and influence shaped contemporary art on the African continent and beyond. The sculpture is an anonymous, armless female bust with closely cropped hair and stands at 2.7 metres tall. Its hollow skirt, scaled directly to fit the artist’s body, reflects Leigh’s interest in the skirt as a vessel.

In Untitled (2023–24) a ceramic torso, again armless, with a perfectly round afro, sits atop a skirt composed of 313 ceramic cowrie shells. Long associated with women’s bodies, fertility and prosperity, cowries were also used as currency across Africa and beyond. They remain enduring symbols within the African diaspora, alluding to Atlantic histories and shifting forms of value. Shown here on Margate’s shoreline, the work evokes the tides and currents that carried these shells, binding local place to global histories.

The Bukhman Foundation is proud to support Simone Leigh: Recent Sculptures , installed in the Sunley Gallery at Turner Contemporary.

The sculptures are on view from 3rd October 2025 to 15th March 2026. Admission free.

About Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh was born in Chicago in 1967 and first began exhibiting her work in the early 2000s. She has had solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among others. In 2014 she presented The Free People’s Medical Clinic in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, a project commissioned by Creative Time. Her work was included in the 2012 and 2019 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Leigh is the first artist to be commissioned for the High Line Plinth; her monumental sculpture Brick House was unveiled in April 2019.

Leigh represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 with her exhibition, Simone Leigh: Sovereignty. Leigh’s work was also included in the central exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant. In 2022, she presented Loophole of Retreat: Venice, a three-day symposium curated by Rashida Bumbray and featured presentations by over 60 artists, writers, performers, and activists. In 2023, her 20-year career survey exhibition opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and travelled to the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

About the Curator

Daniella Rose King is a curator and writer based in London. She is currently Lead Curator, Collections Galleries at Wellcome Collection. Her curatorial practice focuses on artists from the Caribbean and Black diasporas, exploring questions of place, memory and relation through feminist and ecological perspectives. She was previously Adjunct Curator, Caribbean Diasporic Art: Hyundai Tate Research Centre at Tate and guest curator of Dominique White and Alberta Whittle: Sargasso Sea (ICA Philadelphia, 2024).

Images

Installation view of Simone Leigh: Recent Sculptures, 2025. Courtesy Turner Contemporary. Photo: Betty Saunders. © Turner Contemporary

Simone Leigh, 'Bisi', 2023. © Simone Leigh. Courtesy Turner Contemporary. Photo: Betty Saunders.

Simone Leigh, 'Untitled', 2023, © Simone Leigh, Courtesy Turner Contemporary. Photo: Betty Saunders.