Touring Exhibitions

At the Sainsbury Centre, we combine unique objects with exceptional curatorial expertise to produce high quality exhibitions available to tour.

Our exhibitions tell fascinating stories based on the original research and knowledge of curators and experts across the Sainsbury Centre and the University of East Anglia. The objects are drawn from the Centre’s renowned collections and from its access to private and institutional lenders worldwide.

We work flexibly with touring partners to create bespoke exhibitions and to accommodate the needs of individual venues and diverse audiences. We offer hands-on support on delivery, installation, marketing and technical issues to ensure that exhibitions are installed successfully and within budget.

We are pleased to have worked with a variety of international and national institutions to tour our exhibitions to the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Francis Bacon and the Masters), Vancouver Art Gallery (Alberto Giacometti: A Line Through Time), Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham (Rana Begum: Space Light Colour), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific). 

In addition, the Sainsbury Centre has small curated packages that showcase individual master artists such as Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Lucie Rie, and draw groups of spectacular highlights from the collection.

For further information, please contact Tania Moore, Chief Curator of Art 01603 592472, tania.moore@uea.ac.uk

Available March 2027 to March 2028

Size: variable

Following its success at the New Zealand Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, this exhibition presents Yuki Kihara’s Paradise Camp in the UK for the first time and debuts her new project, Darwin Drag.

The exhibition will shift the typical white, male perspective of history – specifically that of Paul Gauguin and Charles Darwin – to an Indigenous queer perspective. Paradise Camp addresses lionised artist, Paul Gauguin’s exoticizing of Indigenous peoples. Kihara has recreated compositions from the paintings produced by Gauguin when he lived in Tahiti from 1891 to 1901.Unlike Gauguin’s unnamed figures, Kihara features her own Fa’afafine community in colourful, hyperreal photographs. Fa’afafine translates to ‘in the manner of a woman’ indicating a third gender in Sāmoa.

Reinvigorating the project for a UK audience, Paradise Camp will be shown alongside a new project, Darwin Drag. The project is born from new research revealing that British evolutionary biologist, Charles Darwin, hid aspects of his research on non-heteronormative species and same-sex attraction in animals due to the prevailing conservative values at the time. A video work will feature Kihara dressed in the guise of Charles Darwin who will confide to Kihara that he has been unhappy keeping his secret in the closet about queer species for so long. The exhibition will feature a selection of Yuki’s works and the Vārchive, a term coined by Kihara. Yuki uses the Sāmoan concept of Vā to describe her relationship with her archival research.

 

‘The space between, the betweenness, not the empty space, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together.’
– Albert Wendt describing Vā.

 

As part of her creative practise, she delves in archives, places and issues which build into new evolutions of her artistic works. The Vārchive includes her personal research, images of rare books by 19th century explorers, colonial paintings, and pamphlets documenting her journey to create ‘Darwin in Paradise Camp.’

 

“Paradise Camp cleverly satirizes the Orientalism purported by Western colonial powers and reinstates Indigenous queer histories from a counter perspective.”
– Muse: Vanguard of photography culture.

Available from 17 November 2025

Size: variable

What does it feel like to live underwater, be inside a shell or even the belly of a whale? While some humans have pursued life underwater, through submarine exploration and developing experimental deep-sea habitats, others have been forced into it, as in the hold of the slave ship. Meanwhile, the enduring fascination with the sea has seen it brought indoors, put on display in natural history museums and aquariums.

This exhibition explores humanity’s interconnections, interrelationships, and immersion in oceans through interior space, both bodily and architectural. From nature writer Rachel Carson to Oceanian scholar and poet Teresia Teaiwa, many have observed that the sea lives inside us, coursing through our blood, sweat and tears, a testament to our shared oceanic origins. While humans evolved from the sea and are born from watery wombs, the sea is also associated with the inner spaces of the mind. Sigmund Freud famously labelled an experience of psychic oneness the ‘oceanic feeling’ and for the surrealists the deep sea was synonymous with the unconscious.

Many Indigenous and diasporic communities’ have intimate relationships to oceans, yet western European and settler-colonial traditions often view the sea as an unknowable ‘Other’. The sublime ‘open sea’ and its seemingly fathomless depths have dominated marine imagery. In contrast, artworks in this exhibition explore ideas of marine interiority and the ways oceans have been domesticated, reimagined on a bodily scale and brought inside to the dry air of the gallery, whether to be tamed, contained or better understood.

Co-curated by Sarah Wade + Pandora Syperek.

Available from 31 August 2025

Size: variable

Artists and artefacts charting 250 years of history, exploring the human impact on the seas. Featuring works by artists Maggi Hambling, Ena Rothschild, John Crome, Olafur Elisson and many more.

 

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.

– E.E. Cummings

 

A day by the sea or rain at Wimbledon – water shapes so much of British life. But what happens when the seas that sustain us can no longer support life? As the climate crisis intensifies, the future of water becomes more uncertain, reshaping histories, societies and ecosystems.

A World of Water uncovers the seas’ untold story. The oceans are a silent witness to the rise and fall of empires and the ebb and flow of human endeavour. From Viking raiders to seafarers navigating distant shores, the sea has observed it all. It has witnessed the birth of the modern world, where wealth has driven progress in science, art, and culture. Yet, it has also watched coastlines recede and felt the growing impact of human-driven climate change, reshaping our world in ways we are just beginning to understand.

This exhibition invites you to pause, reflect and engage, opening yourself to curiosity and empathy. It begins with the North Sea, tracing East Anglia’s deep maritime connections to the Low Countries and expands to the interconnected seas that shape our world of water.

Curated by Ken Paranada- Curator of Art and Climate Change at the Sainsbury Centre.