Jonathan Baldock

Contested Bodies is a group exhibition curated by Marcelle Joseph and Laura Claveria that interrogates and celebrates the performativity of gender as a social construct. It understands gender as a cultural fiction with no fixed, natural or innate characteristics, but as an act that is performed and reproduced at individual, societal and institutional levels. Runs from 25 October 2023 to 6 April 2024 at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.

An expansive group exhibition curated by Marcelle Joseph, featuring a cross-generational and international group of artists alongside the inaugural collection of furniture designs by Ada Interiors. The exhibition reimagines the gallery space as the private home of a fictional art collector set in London in the present day. Based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, this particular aesthete – a passionate, brilliant and eccentric character who lives and breathes art - navigates fluidly through time and gender, au courant with the latest cultural trends and equally in tune with the past.