Samuel Fosso at Leeds Art Gallery

Group Exhibition: To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates
Two images from Samuel Fosso's series 70s Lifetyle are included in To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates, an exhibition touring venues in the UK organized by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Hayward Gallery Touring.
 
The exhibition is on view at Leeds Art Gallery from May 16 through June 21, 2025; MK Gallery from October 25, 2025 through February 8, 2026; and Nottingham Castle from March 20 through June 21, 2026.
 
The exhibition's curatorial spirit stems from a fragment of poetry within Miles Davis’s ‘Inamorata’ (1971), which asks: ‘Who is this music that which description may never justify? / Can the ocean be described?’. For Yiadom-Boakye, poetry’s ability to translate the intangible into images the mind can hold, and to think through rhythm and feeling, is similar to the act of painting.
 
Yiadom-Boakye expands: “My deployment of words in writing is not always so different to my use of brush marks in painting. The logic, patterns, relationships, repetitions and decisions are guided by intuition — the rightness and wrongness, the blatancies and subtleties — and that’s how I want to approach this show.”
 
Fosso's work is included alongside works by Bas Jan Ader, Pierre Bonnard, Lisa Brice, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Peter Hujar, Kahlil Joseph, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Otolith Group, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Walter Sickert, Édouard Vuillard, David Wojnarowicz, and others.
 
Find out more on the Southbank Art Centre's website.
Touring through June 21, 2026