Drawing from the aesthetics of folk art and vernacular architecture, Caspar Heinemann (b. 1994, London), explores the interconnectivity of spiritual, political and sexual counterculture. This is the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK.

In his work to date, Heinemann’s subjects have evolved through speculative fiction, such as a revisionist biography of Ted Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber. He has referenced early Gay Liberation Front actions, Mary Whitehouse’s campaigns against homosexuality and the 1990s anti-roads movements in the UK. Developing these narratives across sculpture, performance, writing and drawing, Heinemann considers how queer storytelling might be harnessed as a mode of opposition.

At Studio Voltaire, Heinemann will utilise objects commonly used to attract or repel. Playing with transformation and scale, Heinemann’s exhibition will include miniaturised, diorama-like assemblages alongside a major site-specific installation, suspending a series of sculptures from the ceiling to upend the audience’s viewpoint.

The unifying concept for this new body of work is the word sod. The term has multivalent applications, variously meaning the ground, the soil itself, or a person’s native ground. It can also refer to an unfortunate man, a gay man, a lucky man; used to express something difficult, or feelings of anger. In Biblical Hebrew, sod is an untranslatable word, often interpreted as ‘secret’, but also as meaning a council or circle, and the highest level of mystical interpretation.

The exhibition follows an onsite production residency, during which Heinemann is furthering his explorations of the politics of land, folk revival and spiritual histories.