Beyond Words:
New work by Helen Cammock, Hannah Dawn Henderson and Lubaina Himid

Commissioned by Book Works and produced by the Freedom Festival Arts Trust

Private view: 6 April 2017
5:30–7.30pm
Talks and artist’s performance from 6.00pm
Exhibition: 7-27 April 2017
Hull Central Library, Gallery
Albion St, HU1 3TF

Focusing on the issues of slavery and colonialism, sex and gender, freedom of information, protest and censorship, Beyond Words presents the idea of freedom as part of a process of public dialogue, ongoing struggle, a rejection of the proprietary understanding of art and language, and a celebration of the challenges that artists can make to the status quo.

For this element of Beyond Words, three new projects have been commissioned that extend and develop the interest and issues of freedom, from archive research, through family history, personal memories, and political conjuncture. Two artists, Helen Cammock and Hannah Dawn Henderson, have been commissioned for projects developed out of residencies at the Hull History Centre and the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull, alongside a new artist’s book commission with Lubaina Himid. For each of the artists the complex history of a port city such as Hull has provided the visual and social context to explore and research the relationships of community, trade, survival and exclusion, or to provide a backdrop for paintings, whose messages extend out into the world of design, textiles and political activism.