Output details

Donald Rodney: in retrospect.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the death of the Black British Artist Donald Rodney, a retrospective exhibition of his work was staged at the Institute of International Visual Art, curated in collaboration with the then InIVA director Sebastian Lopez. This new research was framed to reappraise the significance of Rodney’s practice both to contemporaneous discourses at the moment of the work’s creation, and subsequently.

As a creative collaborator of Rodney’s from the early 1980s until his death in 1998 caused by complications due to Sickle Cell Anemia, I was well positioned gather together and appraise many of the key works of Rodney’s which were housed in public collections as well as those remaining within his estate. This also involved a review of the various writings, articles and reviews of Rodney’s work published to date; principally ‘Donald Rodney: Doublethink’, edited by Richard Hylton and published by Autograph and the catalogue for ‘9 Night in Eldorado’ Rodney’s final solo show, held at the South London Gallery in 1997. This research was in the preparation for the InIVA Exhibition Guide for which Piper wrote the introduction, as well as the accompanying texts for each of the works in the exhibition.

The exhibition was accompanied by a calendar of events organized by Lopez and Piper. These included a Curators’ Gallery Talk by Lopez and Piper, and an in-conversation event chaired by Piper on the use of new technology within Rodney’s work with artists Mike Phillips and Geoff Cox.

The output is presented via portfolio, which should be viewed in order to gain a proper understanding of the research.