Entry
Free
Dates
Fri 3 Oct 2025–Sun 15 Mar 2026
Hours
Tue–Sun, 10am–5pm
and Bank Holidays
Location
Sunley Gallery, Turner Contemporary
Experience two monumental sculptures by acclaimed American artist Simone Leigh.
Admission to Turner is free. A one-off or regular donation will help support artists to realise exciting new exhibitions and inspire over 300,000 children, young people and adults each year with free access to art and creative activities.
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Simone Leigh (born 1967, Chicago, USA) 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.
Installed in the Sunley Gallery, Leigh’s monumental sculptures connect the female body to the movements of people, objects, and ideas across the seas.
The exhibition is guest curated by Daniella Rose King.
Supported by the Bukhman Foundation
‘Leigh's powerful sculptures speak to Black female subjectivity, histories of resilience, care, and community. Their presence continues our commitment to presenting the most significant sculptors working today while fostering conversations that resonate far beyond our gallery walls.’
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Simone Leigh 'Untitled' 2023 © Simone Leigh. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. -
Simone Leigh 'Untitled' 2023 (detail) © Simone Leigh. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. -
Simone Leigh 'Bisi' 2023 © Simone Leigh. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck -
Simone Leigh 'Bisi' 2023 (detail) © Simone Leigh. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck
About the artist
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.
