Ikon hosts Midlands-based artist Exodus Crooks’ exhibition Epiphany (Temporaire), commissioned by Ort Gallery and International Curators Forum (ICF), originally presented at Block 336 in Summer 2023. Curated by Orphée Kashala, the exhibition includes sculpture, film, text and sculptural installation.   

Following their Ikon exhibition, Exodus presents new work commissioned by Ikon and University of Birmingham at The Exchange, the University’s city centre venue. This new work, supported by Vivid Projects, responds to the University’s 2024 public programme theme of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and coincides with the launch of The Stuart Hall Archive Project, a new research project that will expand public understanding and engagement with the work of celebrated Jamaican-British academic and cultural theorist, Professor Stuart Hall. 

Exodus Crooks is a British-Jamaican multidisciplinary artist, educator and writer whose art practice centres on the relationship with self. Observing the results of fractious domesticity, despair and passion, their art tends to appear as questions of self-actualisation and the role that religion and spirituality play in that journey to enlightenment.  

Orphée Kashala is a UK-based Pan-African and Diasporic art curator and cultural producer. Kashala was a producer at Maokwo, Coventry (2020-2021), and was selected for the Emergence(y) project in Birmingham (2021), an Ort Gallery and ICF residency provision for emerging curators to develop their practices. His curatorial practice is a recourse to art and artists as mediums to lead the collective interrogation, interpretation and reckoning with human complexity. Kashala leans into contradiction and complication to untangle an intrinsically resistant, liberated, and decolonised counter-visuality. 

This new commission is supported by University of Birmingham and Ikon Investment Fund.