Inheritance brings together a constellation of artworks that confront the legacies that shape our present moment, and ask how we can create a better future for humanity. In the mid-2020s, we live in the aftermath of a devastating pandemic, amid widening social polarisation, the threat of climate collapse, and growing geopolitical instability. In this unsettled landscape, we are compelled to reckon with how we have arrived at this point. Inheritance traces the tension between loss and recovery, destruction and resilience, and the long shadows of empire, colonialism, and ecological damage. Yet, the works in this exhibition do not dwell on what has been lost. They insist that we have agency in shaping what is remembered, restored, and carried forward. Inheritance poses the question: how can we be better ancestors for generations to come? The selected artists answer with gestures of reclamation, action and care – from aligning with natural rhythms and Indigenous knowledge to reviving acts of resistance and imagining new futures.
The exhibition spans installation, film, drawing, and sculpture, with works by Marcus Coates, Miriam de Búrca, Susan Hiller, Anna Maria Maiolino, Kathy Prendergast, Cornelia Parker, and the collaborative research project Selvagem – Cycle of Studies. Each proposes different strategies for navigating what we inherit and what we pass on.
Kathy Prendergast’s The End and the Beginning, 1996, offers an intimate meditation on continuity, made from three generations of human hair – her mother’s, her own, and her daughter’s – wound around a wooden spool, normally used for thread. Fragile yet enduring, it reminds us that inheritance is not only cultural and political but deeply personal. Anna Maria Maiolino’s A Story, 2010/2024, stages a dialogue between the artist and a distant ancestor, searching for hope in a world scarred by violence and ecological collapse, affirming imagination and connection as vital tools for survival.
Susan Hiller’s Lost and Found, 2016, traces the echoes of once vibrant cultures by giving voice to extinct and endangered languages. Yet many of the languages we hear in this work have been revived - a quiet but profound reminder that acts of listening and care can actively shape a more rich and plural future.
Cornelia Parker’s THE FUTURE (Sixes and Sevens), 2023, brings the voices of children into the conversation. In this two-screen installation, primary school children imagine their futures, sharing their hopes and expectations. If Hiller gives voice to the disappearing past, Parker foregrounds those who will inherit what comes next, forming a dialogue across time - the voices of the past and the voices of the future – both urging us to listen and to consider what we ourselves will pass on.
Miriam de Búrca’s work challenges systems of power inherited from the colonial past. Using the ornate glass painting technique of verre églomisé, once prized by wealthy elites, to gild acts of protest into luminous images. In reframing what could be dismissed as vandalism, de Búrca transforms resistance into a gesture of resilience.
Other artists guide us toward more-than-human perspectives. Marcus Coates’ Nature Calendar, 2022, lists seasonal events according to the rhythms of plants and animals, recalling older ways of attuning to natural cycles. Selvagem’s The Feral and the Sphere, 2022, proposes new epistemologies grounded in Indigenous knowledge and ecological care, imagining futures that resist extractive systems and affirm interdependence.
Together, these powerful works ask us not only what legacies have brought us here, but what we choose to carry forward. They suggest that acts of attention, care, and imagination can reshape the future and reenchant the world.
