
Showcasing a major new multimedia project, Zadie Xa creates a sub-aquatic marine environment, inviting audiences to enter into an immersive world by way of atmospheric lighting, surround-sound, large-scale video projections, sculptures and costumes
Xa brings together imagined and learned Korean folklore, transforming diasporic knowledge into new realities. Within her immersive world, she presents an origin story inspired by Korean creation myths, centred on the giant goddess Grandmother Mago (Magohalmi). Exploring the passing down of ancestral knowledge through the matrilineal social structures that are based on the separation of responsibilities between male and female deities in the creation of the universe, the work confronts the goddesses’ shift in cultural status over time, from central to marginal.
Saturday 1 February – Monday 4 May
Bexhill on Sea
The De La Warr Pavilion is located a few minutes’ walk from the sea, on the South Coast of the United Kingdom, facing Europe. It is an icon of modernist architecture designed by refugee Erich Mendelsohn and émigré Serge Chermayeff. Throughout 2020, set against a backdrop of increasing political division in the UK and beyond, we harness our history and location to present artists, designers and activists whose work engages imaginatively with ideas of borders, diasporic identities and the impact of colonisation across time and space.