Gestural Poethics
Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany, 2025
Text by curator, Søren Grammel:
Rhea Dillon’s practice engages with the lived experiences of Black individuals and communities, placing the existential question of belonging at the intersection of ongoing reflections on racialised histories, systemic discrimination, and the enduring legacies of colonialism within Western societies and institutions.
Her artistic inquiry, pursued across various media—from sculpture and painting to poetry and olfactive work—draws on post-minimalist and conceptualist approaches, while actively engaging with postcolonial theory and critique. In her sculptures, Dillon confronts materials historically associated with colonialism, racism, or racial violence—reworking their charged legacies through strategies of appropriation and reinterpretation. In doing so, they loosely draw on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “critical reinscription,” not merely imbuing these materials with new meaning, but transforming their symbolic register and destabilising their historical connotations.[2] Through the artworks in this exhibition, she explores the potential of the gestural as a means of becoming unhinged from the dominance of a Western model of subjectivity, constituted through self-consciousness and separation, and critiqued by Denise Ferreira da Silva for being exclusionary and structured by racialised logics of difference.[3] And in her poetic works and poems, Dillon implements processes of encryption such as the omission of certain passages of text. With this, she draws on techniques that are sometimes used in literary texts by Black writers such as Toni Morrison, and which can be understood as a strategy of creating spaces of Black intimacy, opacity, and resistance – an aesthetic refusal to conform to the expectations of legibility shaped by dominant (often white) interpretive frameworks.[4]
Dillon’s work relates to broader currents of global decolonisation and enters into dialogue with the theories of contemporary authors such as Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman and Stuart Hall, whose book “The Fateful Triangle” initiated a major rethinking of the concepts of identity, race, nation, and ethnicity.5 The artist is herself a descendant of the Windrush Generation – people who migrated to Britain from the Caribbean in the decades after the Second World War, many of whom have faced systemic state discrimination and the denial of citizenship rights—harsh legacies that persist into the present.
The Heidelberger Kunstverein is pleased to present Gestural Poethics, Rhea Dillon’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, offering a focused engagement with a central strand of her multifaceted artistic practice.
With the kind support of the City of Heidelberg, the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts and the Baden-Württemberg Foundation.
Download: Exhibition pamphlet < EDIT THIS, AND ALL IMAGES
piercing space and parting seas, 2022-24
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Prayer., 2022-24
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Less than that;, 2022-24
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
carried on the spirit air., 2022-24
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
There’s so much air in the word
for wishes for, wishes of., 2022-24
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Photography: Paul Salveson
Notes
2] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak developed the concept of critical reinscription, as a strategy aimed not only at deconstructing hegemonic discourse but also at rewriting it through repetition and recoding. Cf. for example Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988) and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999).
3] Denise Ferreira da Silva has written numerous texts criticising the Cartesian idea of an autonomous subject, grounded through its own consciousness, as a colonial and racialised construction. Key texts here include Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and On Difference Without Separability (2016).
4] Toni Morrison uses targeted gaps in narrative – silence, omission and writing for a Black audience – as a form of literary self-empowerment. Cf. for example Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and The Site of Memory (1987). Saidiya Hartman reflects on such strategies—particularly in Scenes of Subjection (1997) and Lose Your Mother (2007)—and critiques the voyeuristic impulse within archival practices to make everything visible. In her concept of “critical fabulation”, she combines archival material with literary imagination—especially where gaps, omissions or absences persist.
5] Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle (2017).