Black Waters: Inference to The Veil

14th March - 25th April 2026
Jerwood Curatorial Fellowship at The Glasgow School of Art
Reid Gallery,  Glasgow



Photographs ©Matthew Arthur Williams, Scans ©Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie

ABOUT  THE EXHIBITION



Inference to The Veil announces Black Waters’ debut exhibition. Drawing on Black feminist methodologies and Black scholarship, the exhibition convenes archival and collection works with invited independent artists in a shared curatorial field. This gesture situates Glasgow-based practices within a broader UK and African diasporic constellation.

The exhibition stages Glasgow as the centre from which to perceive the scale and afterlives of the global colonial project, and the precise, opaque, continuously emergent ways Black life subsists and composes. The exhibition has been developed, particularly in relation to questions of perspective, visual authority, and the historical and contemporary processes through which Black life is obscured. These concerns directly informed the exhibition title, ‘Inference to The Veil’, which reflects the project’s focus on abstraction, opacity, and concealment as both tools of oppressive social design and as counter-strategies for resistance and refusal. For Black curatorial practice, inference becomes a means of recollection and assemblage; studying alongside fragments, distortions and omissions as a methodology for pronouncing Black life and testimony.

Black Waters: Inference to the Veil marks the culmination of the inaugural Jerwood Curatorial Fellowship at The Glasgow School of Art 2025 and features works from the Jerwood Collection and Glasgow School of Art Archives & Collections.


ABOUT  BLACK WATERS



Black Waters - Black Clyde - Blak Rivers is a collaborative, curatorial research incubator and invocation of assembly, assemblage and the ensemble of material, led by Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie and Żżo / Zoë Charlery. This project explores the capacious fields of Black Geography, Black Geology, Meta-Physics, Hauntology and Phenomenology through the a(live) study and practice of Black Performance. Black Waters' work has been supported by Jerwood Foundation and Glasgow School of Art Exhibitions, David Dale Gallery's Studio Residency in 2023, and the exhibition, 'aweys gaun', as part of Glasgow International 2026.

FEATURED ARTISTS


Barbara Walker
Lubaina Himid
Grace Browne
Camara Taylor

Yinka Shonibare
Rebecca Bellantoni
Adebusola King Ramsay

Kialy Tihngang
Emmanuel Addo-Osafo
Hock Aun Teh
Anna Tewungwa
Michael Armitage
Camara Taylor
Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie



ztumika
tumikastudio[at]gmail.com
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