FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 2025
Sonia E. Barrett exhibits new sculptural works addressing social and environmental injustices throughout Europe
and the United States this fall, on the heels of her recent commission for the City of London
Sonia E. Barrett, courtesy of the Sunderland collection
London, UK – Artist Sonia E. Barrett presents works from her ongoing practice addressing societal and environmental injustice in new exhibitions this fall throughout Europe and the United States, including exhibitions during Frieze in London, an artist residency and exhibition in Miami, a group exhibition in Bremen, and a recent installation commission by the City of London.
Barrett’s practice incorporates found objects—like historical furniture, fabric, hair and maps—to conceptualize the objectification of animals, nature and humans while also expanding the possibilities of how we understand these objects and histories in order to confront the enduring legacies of colonialism. These visually stunning composites of plants, animals, elements and people, heavily influenced by research and materiality, ultimately create new questions where there was a kind of certainty and ways to think outside the hegemony of Eurocentric conventions.
Please find more information about her recent and upcoming projects and exhibitions below.
9 Nights, London, UK
Barrett’s new commission with the City of London, titled 9 Nights, is part of the Revealing the City’s Past project, and officially launched in July, 2025. In the installation, Barrett recreates a “remembrancer cloth” (made with 18th-century tablecloths and her own grandmother’s) like those used in the Ceremony of Quit Rents, one of the oldest ceremonies in London dating back to 1211, on which objects signifying the paying of debts are placed. Barrett’s remembrancer cloth and other elements within the installation remind us instead of all the unpaid debts to the enslaved and to nature, and calls for a 9 night banquet to form new paths towards equity.
Dreading the Map, created as a map-lective. The Royal Geographical Society, London. March 2021. Image: Installation view at Museum Villingen Schwenningen
Le Sel Noir, Bremen, DE
Barrett will exhibit her sculptural intervention Dreading the Map (2021) in the exhibition Le Sel Noir – Perspectives on Black Contemporary Art at Städtische Galerie Bremen, on view August 17 to October 19, 2025. Le Sel Noir is an exhibition of international contemporary art with a socially critical content, the title of which is taken from the 1960 volume of poetry by the postcolonial poet and thinker Édouard Glissant. Its focus is a critical examination of the paternalistic overidentification with Black people in Western countries.
“With her sculptural intervention Dreading the Map (2021), Sonia E. Barrett deconstructs our view of the world in the literal sense: The amorphous structures hanging from the ceiling reveal, upon closer inspection, a meshwork of shredded historical and contemporary maps of England and the Caribbean. The work, with which Barrett won the Dakar Biennale Sculpture Prize last year, conceals a precise postcolonial critique in the lightness of its cloud-like appearance, not only in terms of the materials used, but also through the collaborative process of appropriation and processing of these materials by a group of Afro-Caribbean women who, together with Barrett, form the map-lective collective.” – Oliver Hardt, Texte Zur Kunst
To learn more, please visit here.
Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL, USA
Barrett is participating in the residency program at Fountainhead in August in Miami. Barrett will be creating a new body of work and exhibiting the residency’s exhibition later in the month.
Desk number 6, 2021, Lockable Antique Portable Travel Desk, Mahogany, with embossed leather inlay, wicker, ink and key, 100 x 60 x 60 cm
Exhibitions during Frieze, London, UK
Barrett has two upcoming exhibitions during Frieze in October in London: an exhibition with Gallery OCA at the Royal Over-Seas League, curated by Sherece Rainford, and an exhibition with Messums, curated by Lisa Anderson. In both, she will be exhibiting work made from reconfigurations of 18th-century desks. Barrett writes about the work: “I thought it would be interesting to collapse the technology of mask-making to tell and share specific regional oral archives with the technology of portable desks used to write a continent. These masks are made in Europe of old Edwardian portable desks. I thought they could be a way of speaking back to Empire beyond the archived letters written on them. In performance, they could unlock other archives.”
About Sonia E. Barrett
“My artwork is a rollercoaster of the materials that have shaped my life as a black woman. I work with furniture, maps, hair, cloth, feathers and stones. I trace connections between people, races, animals, and objects to envision a future where we coexist and mourn the shortcomings of the past. I initiate large-scale sculpture that creates space to tackle some of the most challenging problems of our time through collective making.” – Sonia E. Barrett
Sonia E Barrett performs Composites of plants, animals, elements and people to create interventions that presence their objectification and commodification. She also thinks about how to change perceptions of phenomena in “nature” that are a given. The work seeks to create new questions where there was a kind of certainty that has to do with the hegemony of normative Western European values.
Born in the UK of Jamaican and German parentage Sonia E Barrett grew up in Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, Cyprus and the UK. She studied literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland and her MFA at Transart Institute Berlin/New York.
Her work unpacks the boundaries between the Determined and the determining with a focus on race and gender. She makes sculptural works so she can run her hands alone the fissures and manifest strategies for multiple compatible existences and mourn.
Her sculptural practice includes place making with a view to assembling communities under the threat of climate to (Re) claim space as well as instituting permanently.
Sonia is a MacDowell fellow and has been recognised by the Premio Ora prize, NY Art-Slant showcase for sculpture and the Neo Art Prize. She has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Tate Britain, 32 Degrees East Gallery, Kampala, Uganda, the Heinrich Böll Institute, Germany, the British Library, the Museum of Derby, and the Kunsthaus Nürnberg. Her work has been shown at a number of galleries, including the OCCCA California, the NGBK Berlin, Tete Berlin, The Format Contemporary in Milan and Basel, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and the Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia.
Her works have been published and written about in the International Review of African American Art, The British Art Studies Journal, Black History 365, Kunstforum International, Protocollum Journal, ELSE, Financial Times, Evening Standard, Open University Geography Textbooks and Contemporary & América Latina.
Website: https://www.sebarrett.com
Instagram: @soniaelizabethbarrett