Nikita Gale 'IN A DREAM YOU CLIMB THE STAIRS'

Chisenhale Gallery presents LA-based artist Nikita Gale’s first solo exhibition in the UK.
Gale sculpts concrete and metal, light and sound. Composing atmospheric, large-scale installations, Gale’s practice orbits themes of invisibility and audibility, interrogating the unstable relationship between performer and spectator, structure and ruin.
Building on Gale’s ‘RUINER’ series (2020-present) — aluminium armatures evoking crowd-control barriers, wrapped with concrete-saturated strips of cloth — this new commission, ‘IN A DREAM YOU CLIMB THE STAIRS’, consists of remnants of a performance rendered in concrete. The exhibition takes Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel ‘Song of Solomon’ as its starting point, notably the character of Circe, who shares her home with a pack of Weimaraner dogs. Referencing a passage from the book in the exhibition’s title, Gale brings to life an ambitious interpretation of Circe’s feral and free domain — once a grand house, now a decaying testament to the greed and violence of the family she previously served but outlived.