Want the World to Know by Michael Forbes

About

Forbes works with sculpture, installation, photography and digital media to explore themes of racial politics, migration, history, and religion, through a lens that challenges us to examine the dichotomy of blackness and whiteness.

Want the World to Know features Forbes’ monumental totemic sculptures, which incorporate mannequins bound, cocoon-like, in black PVC. The resulting works are bulging forms whose taut skins point to rising political tensions which threaten to tear through. Forbes use of lifejackets alludes to political and humanitarian events as well as religious dogma.

The exhibition features text-based works which utilise the slogans of demonstrators in the 2020 BLM protests. Through these polemical works, Forbes poses vital questions about the demonisation, fetishisation, and control of the Black body.

Want the World to Know also incorporates the imagery of haute couture, where Forbes uses visual representation to challenge narratives around the buying and selling of privilege.

ABOUT MICHAEL FORBES

Michael Forbes has exhibited nationally and internationally, including a solo show at the Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre at the University of Nottingham (2022), Reformation at Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Project (2018), the Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and CPT: Time, History and Memory, Gallatin Galleries, New York (2012). He is Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Associate Artist and was selected in 2020 for YSP’s Royal College of Art Graduate Award.

Alongside his artistic practice, Forbes is a curator. He played a leading role in developing New Art Exchange, Nottingham, and is a co-founder of Primary, an artist studio complex in Nottingham, where he has his studio and is Chair of the Board of Trustees. Forbes has a BA (Hons) in Photography from Nottingham Trent University (1998) and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (2020).