Gestural Poethics
15 June – 7 September, 2025
Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany
Curated by Søren Grammel and Fabienne Finkbeiner
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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
Excerpted from Grammel’s essay in the exhibition pamphlet
or wisdom wonder, 2022-5
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
perceived. -er., 2022-5
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
breath, therefore,, 2022-5
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
E R, 2022-5
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Sapele mahogany, oil stick and paper
95.2 × 125 × 23 cm
Photography: Heidelberger Kunstverein
Additionally, it was important, as in the thickening of poetics by the h to poethics, to thicken this last body of work from my series with programming and reading materials. Myself and the team at HdKV curated both a Reading Room of books that existed downstairs in the Kunstverein, as well as a free Reader that has previously published texts by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Stuart Hall, Sam Selvon, and many others. The Reader is available to download here