Portable Sculpture brings together work from 1934 to the present day. Featuring fifteen artists, including Hannelore Baron, Walead Beshty, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Liz Ensz, Barry Flanagan, Mohamad Hafez, Romuald Hazoumè, Charles Hewlings, Do Ho Suh, Veronica Ryan, Andrea Zittel and presenting new work made for the exhibition by James Ackerley and Claire Ashley.

The word ‘sculpture’ is often associated with large, immobile objects that are weighty and permanent, but sculpture is not always fixed in place: sculpture can be mobile, agile and endlessly adaptable.

The long history of portable sculpture dates back to the small, carved stones made by nomadic tribes during the Ice Age. A combination of unstable geopolitics and sweeping economic change during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has made questions about home and identity, migration and travel, or stability and impermanence ever more pressing. The exhibition explores a variety of responses to circumstances in which permanence is difficult to achieve.

A series of research events and activities accompanies the exhibition. Including speakers TJ Demos (University of California, Santa Cruz), Dr Heather Diack (University of Miami), Dr Jo Melvin (University of the Arts, London / Barry Flanagan Estate) and artists Claire Ashley and Mohamad Hafez.