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.