‘Disruptors: Fractured Images and Migrant Word' featuring Dom Sylvester Houédard at the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London, UK

5 May 2026

From 14 May – 4 September 2026, the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum presents ‘Disruptors: Fractured Images and Migrant Word' featuring Dom Sylvester Houédard and Susan Hiller. This exhibition traces more than a century of experiment in word-image relations, spanning early twentieth-century historical avant-garde practice to post-war developments in concrete poetry and conceptual art. What connects these works is a shared impulse to disrupt the boundary between reading and viewing, producing effects that range from cryptic symbols to direct anti-establishment statements, while probing questions of movement, migration, exile, nostalgia, belonging, conflict, identity, origin, and meaning-making.

Disruption here operates on two levels. It begins as a creative force within the historical avant-gardes and the paths that followed, as artists move words across surfaces and unsettle the conventions of syntax and image-making. It also speaks to lives shaped by movement, from the forced journeys of those fleeing Nazism, to post-war migration, to second-generation artists navigating between cultures, and to the ongoing question of belonging and resettlement. 'Wordl', coined in the spirit of the avant-garde's restless reshaping of language, fuses 'word' and 'world'. It evokes arrival in the UK by different routes, the acquisition of new languages, and the forging of new relationships between word and image, while reshaping the British art world.

Find out more via the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum.

Image: Dom Sylvester Houédard, prayersticks, 1969, Typed page, carbon copy, 20.3 x 23 cm, 8 x 9 in, Framed: 41.5 x 32.5 x 2.5 cm @ Lisson Gallery, Courtesy Lisson Gallery