The Sainsbury Centre programme responds to fundamental societal challenges, answered by living art. We are a museum that recognises art as living entities. Our programming takes place throughout an open plan arts landscape over three floors of our Norman Foster-designed building and out across our sculpture park set within 350 acres of parkland. We curate six-month seasons that ask a single question of broad interest, spanning exhibitions, collection displays, residencies, and the Sculpture Park.
We work innovatively to engage with artists, organisations, thinkers and creators internationally and across all disciplines. We would like to hear from you if your work addresses any of the questions outlined below. If you are interested in contributing to our programme in any way, please contact Tania Moore, the Joyce and Michael Morris Chief Curator: Tania.Moore@uea.ac.uk
Autumn 2024: Why Do We Take Drugs?
This season explores why we take intoxicants – including for spiritual, medicinal, and recreational use – and why and how they are accepted in some cultures and not others. Art and material culture capture the depth and cultural dynamism of this complex human relationship in fascinating ways. Drugs have been used throughout history and, today, most people use drugs of some sort. This season explores how they are integrated into, or alienated from, society.
Spring 2025: Can the Seas Survive Us?
Exploring humanity’s relationship to the seas, this season looks at how we live alongside the seas in coastal communities, how we have a bodily relationship to the seas, or how the seas have been used in constructing a global society. It responds to the urgent need to resuscitate our seas, which are essential for all life, but are vulnerable to acidification and loss of biodiversity.
Autumn 2025: Can We Stop Killing Each Other?
The autumn season will wrestle with one of the darkest and deadliest aspects of humanity. A series of exhibitions will explore the fundamental questions of why humans are led to kill and the culture that wrestles with this notion such as in art, film, TV and theatre. Reflecting on the real material culture linked to particular case studies from the past and present, such as the Holocaust and the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda of 1994, the season will be a challenging but eye-opening consideration of some of the most horrifying events in human history. A series of new paintings by Ethiopian artist Tesfaye Urgessa (b.1983) will also be unveiled, reflecting on the refugee crisis and created in dialogue with the Sainsbury Centre collection. Influenced by neo-expressionism and the London school, Urgessa’s figurative paintings explore the politics of race and identity.
Spring 2026: What Is the Meaning of Life?
Taking the age-old question of the meaning of life, this season asks how do we live a meaningful life? It will examine the structures that cause us to live by societal rules that see us following established roles or lifestyles. How do we challenge and critique these accepted norms of human behaviour to objectively understand if they provide people with the meaning people want in their lives. It will consider how we can break out of these patterns to live more meaningfully, by embracing more playful, counter-cultural or unexpected behaviours.
Winter 2026: Love?
In 2026, the Sainsbury Centre will present Love? How can art help us find humanity’s most enduring and elusive emotion? Love can encompass romantic love, familial love, friendship, community, self-love, compassion, love of living beings, nature or inanimate objects. Love can be selfless and intimate and can lead to care or a sense of responsibility. But how can we find and hold onto it? It is associated with many emotions including trust, respect and empathy. It can also lead to heartbreak and jealousy. Love has been personified in mythology by figures such as Aphrodite, Venus, Freyja and Hathor, who have been widely represented in art. Love has endured throughout history, but is it today changing in an era increasingly shaped by dating apps, algorithms, artificial intelligence and the technological mediation of relationships? Are new terms such as gaslighting and catfishing indicative of new trends, or have forms of these acts always been present? We will look at whether love can endure amidst rapid technological, political, cultural and ecological crises while assessing how artists across the ages have captured and continuously redefined the meaning of love and how we experience it?
Summer 2027: Where Do I Belong?
According to the IOM UN Migration report the global estimate of international migrants in 2020 reached around 281 million, meaning approximately 3.6 of the global population is currently on the move. People relocate for a huge range of reasons: fleeing conflict, economic reasons, seeking opportunities and job security, and in search of safety as asylum seekers and climate refugees. Freedom of movement has become a hotly debated global issue in the twenty-first century owing to political instability, conflict, and economic precarity. Where Do I Belong? activates art to explore new imaginations of migration, identity, permanent and temporary settlements, nomadism, and homelessness past, present and future. It will consider the concept of ‘home’ in relation to feelings of security, and how notions of ‘belonging’ are interconnected with religious and cultural identity, social integration, and family connections. From communities to communes, clubs to collectives, a basic need to ‘belong’ drives us to seek reciprocity, kinship, and acceptance. This season will explore artworks that address both the joy of companionship and the fear of isolation, interrogating the threats to ‘belonging’ that may arise in the form of endangered heritage, erasure of communities, land loss, and social marginalisation.
Winter 2027: What Do I Find Beautiful?
This season will explore the elusive notion of beauty. Defined as an alluring quality in a person or object bringing pleasure to the senses or the mind. We might consider beauty to be subjective in the eye of the beholder, but cultural trends exemplify that what is considered beautiful is always culturally specific, changing over time and hugely varied across subcultures. In culture, beauty has been a marker of the divine, morality or high social status. Human beauty can change with the pursuit of ideal body types, body adornment and modification. Such beauty ideals are represented in art, or the Internet and selfies. The quest for beauty can also lead to body dysmorphia, anxiety and envy. How does beauty relate to perfection? How do we convey and value internal beauty? Beyond the human, beauty is often used to describe nature, and is associated with the sublime. Beauty can be found in the expansive, such as the solar system or in the micro such as the structure of cells. Beauty may be abstract, or stem from a mathematical formula or ratio.
Summer 2028: How Should Our Museum Improve Your Life?
For the Sainsbury Centre’s 50th anniversary, we will explore what museums are for and how they have adapted in a rapidly changing world. Founded in 1978 to break the rules of the museum world, can that ambition be made true half a century later. Reflecting a transformed world, how can the museum be radically re-invented in the 21st Century? Reflecting on five years of understanding our collection as living entities and adopting a fundamental questions-based approach to exhibition programming. This question wants to explore the radical imaginations of what makes museums amazing past, present and future. From private cabinets of curiosities in the sixteenth century, to the opening of the British Museum as the first public museum in 1753, museums were once based around the collections they held. Museums have subsequently proliferated exponentially and expanded their activities, now often having a focus on audiences and experiences. The Sainsbury Centre was radical when it opened in 1978 for how it displayed art from across the world and different time periods without a sense of hierarchy. Building on these foundations, the Sainsbury Centre want to push the boundaries of what museums can be today. We invite collaboration and radical thinking to help move forward.