This programme takes place within Theaster Gates’s installation Black Image Corporation presented by Prada, The Vinyl Factory, and The Showroom. Collective Intimacy is inspired by Gates’s ethos of collaboration and The Showroom’s commitment to togetherness and communal knowledge, taking on multiple trans-located narratives of the current Black experience as a point of departure for a cosmopolitan worldview. In response to Gates’s reactivated spaces in Chicago and how his socially engaged projects enable communities to connect and grow, Collective Intimacy aims to create a new space for people to gather, listen, converse, and contemplate amongst a fusion of art, design, music, and everyday life.

Black Image Corporation presents distinct spaces creating a myriad of possibilities for collective engagements, featuring an installation of Gates’s art objects, furnishings, and new films that capture the methodologies of urban renewal and community activation founding his practice. Pieces from Chicago imbued with powerful histories, uses, and localities resonate with distinctive lounge design from here in London – like a love letter between two cities, under the roof of a new House. Taking place at both 180 The Strand and The Showroom, Collective Intimacy hosts interdisciplinary interventions by artists, musicians, designers, writers, thinkers, collectives and members of the public, who are all invited to distort notions of selfhood and togetherness in the spirit of creating a global community.

Artist Tremaine Emory presented an installation of his piece A Proper Burial Finally, Thanks America! alongside a conversation with Artist Theaster Gates and Director Elvira Dyangani Ose

“America’s never had a wake or a funeral,” Emory says, “For all the slaves that built the country over time, all the servants after slavery ended, everyone that was lynched or shot by a cop, all the atrocities that have happened to Africans that were taken from Africa and brought to America… A lot of cultures do wakes, particularly in the culture I grew up in, [which is] Baptist Christian. The last wake I went to was my mother’s wake and I thought it was the most horrible idea, [being] in the presence of something you love no longer being here. As painful as it was, when I think back it’s a beginning to moving past that pain. That’s how this idea started, thinking of my mum so much, and where it started. It started with the wake.”

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