Commemorating Malcolm X on the centenary of his birth and 60th anniversary of his assassination, 1965: Malcolm in the winter: a translation exercise marks Theaster Gates’s first contact with the archive of late Japanese journalist Ei Nagata and his partner Haruhi Ishitani. Through a series of architectural interventions, large-scale installations, archival works and new film works, Gates engages with the methods of care and preservation nurtured in Japanese philosophy and craftsmanship, drawing upon them as a framework to consider the role of art and aesthetics in shaping political, ideological and cultural legacies.

Having cultivated a relationship with Japan for over two decades – first during his training residency as a ceramicist in Tokoname in 2004 – Gates’s latest creative endeavour stems from his encounter with Ishitani following his 2024 solo exhibition Afro-mingei at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan. Ishitani and Nagata had both been present at Malcolm X’s assassination on 21 February 1965, shortly after he addressed the crowd at an Organization of Afro-American Unity (OOAU) event. Moved to action by this catalytic moment, they endeavoured to carry his message beyond the US to Japan, where the Black American fight for civil rights found renewed resonance in the Japanese left’s struggles against militarism and the legacy of occupation. Together, Nagata and Ishitani devoted themselves to documenting and translating the pivotal final months of Malcolm X’s life, the aftermath of his death and the currents of the broader Black Liberation Movement, bringing this history into the awareness of the Japanese public.

Positioning translation as the exhibition’s central axis, Gates re-engages with the archive’s transferred, disseminated and conserved materials to initiate his own artistic dialogue with its collected narratives. ‘This project […] helps me ask questions about who I am in relationship to these ideologies, how we tell stories about things we believe in, and where art lives in relationship to movements and movement building.’ Showcased in the North Galleries, the archive chronicles the proliferation of events leading up to Malcolm X’s assassination and its aftermath, while simultaneously underscoring Nagata and Ishitani’s engagement with other US-based and transnational socialist and Black power movements of the era – some rooted in Malcolm’s ideology, others developing in parallel. Editorial records from allied radical presses and underground counterculture newspapers document not only the activities, imprisonments and assassinations of prominent American socialist leaders – including Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton and Martin Luther King, Jr. – but also spotlight radical movements and global efforts against racial and social inequality.

Bringing to the fore Gates’s reciprocal modes as artist, archivist, curator and cultural interlocutor, the exhibition draws the archive into the evolving scope of his artistic repertoire. Revisiting his investigations into roofing materials and techniques, Gates expands the vocabulary of his ongoing Tar paintings series by introducing political imagery and acronyms for the first time, including the iconography of the Civil Rights era, the logos and visual lexicon of Black liberation movements such as the OOAU and the Black Panther Party. Three freestanding tar paintings, mounted on wooden structures along the gallery’s corridor, form part of a new series within Gates’s ongoing body of tar works; layering collaged segments of brightly painted roofing material with elements of Japanese ink calligraphy on paper, Gates fuses language and symbolism with more formal investigations of colour, scale and dimensionality.

A suite of seven new works titled Black ads (2025) – wall-mounted scrolling lightbox screens displayed in the 9 x 9 x 9 gallery – build upon the visual language of propaganda and advertisement. Emphasizing the notion of the artist-as-caretaker, Gates’s lightboxes display images from the University of Chicago’s archival collection of glass lantern slides – a vast repository spanning art and architectural history from the Palaeolithic period to the modern era, of which fewer than 100 of its 60,000 works depict African art. The slides feature alongside Japanese text from Ishitani’s archive and portraits of Black life taken from the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) archive, an archive which Gates has been engaging with for over a decade in his artistic practice. Ebony magazines from the JPC archive are also housed within the library installation Abstract revolutionary periodical superstructure (I stole the Master’s library shelving and filled it with books) (2025) presented in South Gallery II, which features a steel bookshelf salvaged by Gates from the Carnegie Library at the University of Iowa.

The large-scale installation A libation in uncertain times (2024) in the entry of South Gallery II serves as one of the exhibition’s focal points, one envisioned by Gates as a celebration of cultural exchange and synergies. Featuring approximately 1,000 binbo tokkuri – traditional Japanese sake vessels produced in the Edo period (1603–1868) and marked with family crests – these tokkuri were sourced in collaboration with potter Tani Q and now bear the name of Gates’s production company in Japan, ‘Mon Industries’. Exploring how ceremony and ritual facilitate transitions between communal and private realms, the sculpture Malcolm’s hut (2025) draws inspiration from traditional Japanese tea houses. Connecting Gates’s exploration of Black histories with the ethos of care and respect embedded in Japanese culture, the work’s title underscores his endeavour to unearth, and make visible, the intersections of Blackness within Japan. Activating these ideas across social spheres – through material culture and, in other contexts, music – Gates probes how a Japanese aesthetic can be mobilised to express and articulate a Black politic.

Gates’s mode of salvaging and repurposing his materials resonates with a broader interrogation of art’s formal traditions. At the far end of South Gallery II, A path, east facing (2025) establishes a walkway reminiscent of the passage guided by torii gates, traditionally used to mark the entrances of Shinto shrines in Japan. Constructed from Azobe wood beams – a West African hardwood regarded for its exceptional durability – Gates’s reclamation imbues the wood with renewed significance, transforming it into a metaphorical threshold: a contemplative space for the spiritual transition from the mundane to the sacred in Japanese worship. Three large wooden Huts (2021/25) – constructed from salvaged pinewood obtained during the renovation of New York’s Park Avenue Armory building – invoke the deductive structures and rigid geometries found in the works of Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt. As studies in spatial geometry, the huts also explore notions of shelter and artistic and philosophical retreat. Gates’s commemorative pursuit continues with his series of black Stoneware vessels (2022–23), displayed in the North Galleries, whose monolithic forms evoke the solemnity of grave markers. Their titles honour Civil Rights activists martyred for their cause – Fred Hampton, James Chaney, Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., Wharlest Jackson – figures whose names come to embody the collective sacrifice of the movement.

Recounting their intimate encounters with this revolutionary moment in history, Nagata and Ishitani’s archive occupies a poignant place in Gates’s dedication to Malcolm X. Throughout the Bermondsey gallery, three newly conceived films enliven the archive through orated passages, historical footage, and an evocative performance by a Japanese shamisen player, who re-interprets blues, prayer songs, and melodies by the Black Monks, the musical group assembled by Gates, on his traditional string instrument. In the North Galleries, the featured film highlights Ishitani reciting one of Malcolm X’s final speeches, Prospects for Freedom (1965) – translated into Japanese by herself and Nagata. Since Nagata’s passing, Ishitani’s care and stewardship of the archive has become a touchstone for Gates, inspired as he is by the couple’s shared commitment to broadening the archive’s scope of engagement and his personal investments in the archive’s activation. ‘An institution would immediately remove these things from the public, take them down and down into the dungeons of a building to keep them protected’, Gates states, ‘But this is activism. These documents want to be active.’

Theaster Gates was born in 1973 in Chicago where he lives and works. He is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts and serves as the Special Advisor to the President for Arts Initiatives.

Gates has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago, Illinois (2024); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2024); Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Texas (2024); LUMA Foundation, Arles, France (2024 and 2023); New Museum, New York (2022); Serpentine Pavilion, London (2022); Frederick Kiesler Foundation, Vienna, (2022); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2021); TANK Shanghai (2021); Prada Rhong Zhai, Shanghai (2021); Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia (2020); Tate Liverpool, UK (2020); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2019); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2019); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018); Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (2018); National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2017); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois (2013); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013); Seattle Art Museum, Washington, DC (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin (2010); and St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2010).

Gates has participated in many group exhibitions including Luma & Cetera Foundation, Gstaad, Switzerland (2025); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (2024); High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia (2024); Palazzo Barberini, Rome (2024); Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates (2024); 18th International Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy (2023); Fondazione Prada, Venice, Italy (2023); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2023); Punta della Dogana – Pinault Collection, Venice, Italy (2023); Sharjah Biennial 15, United Arab Emirates (2023); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2022); Aichi Triennale, Tokoname City, Japan (2022); Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson (2022); New Museum, New York (2021); Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Crystal Bridges Museum, Arkansas (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (2020); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015); 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Prospect 3, New Orleans, Louisiana (2014); Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012); and Whitney Biennial, New York (2010).

Gates is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees including the 39th World Cultural Council Award (2024); Isamu Noguchi Award (2023); Friedrich Kiesler Prize for Architecture and Art (2021); the Royal Institute of British Architects (2021); the World Economic Forum Crystal Award (2020); J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development (2018); Nasher Sculpture Prize (2018); Sprengel Museum Kurt Schwitters Prize (2017); and Artes Mundi 6 prize (2015). In April 2018 Gates was appointed the first distinguished visiting artist and Director of Artist Initiatives at the Lunder Institute for American Art, Colby College, Waterville, Maine. He was the visiting artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome (2020); and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.

Special thanks is given to Haruhi Ishitani, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Masataka Hosoo and the Hosoo Textiles, Yutaka Oyama, Seika Mori and Kaya Higashino.