Keywords

Tate Liverpool in partnership with Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) presents Keywords, an exhibition and talks programme based on Raymond Williams’s study of the vocabulary of culture and society. Artists include Sonia Boyce, Rotimi Fani-Kayode,Sunil Gupta, Derek Jarman, Richard Hamilton, Lubaina Himid and Donald Rodney. The exhibition will be presented in a specially designed space by artist Luca Frei and designer Will Holder.

First published in 1976, Keywords is a seminal work in the study of the English language. Williams understood ‘Keywords’ as those words that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society. The book contains over 130 short essays on words such as ‘theory’, ‘criticism’, ‘technology’, ‘violence’ and ‘art,’ providing an account of the word’s current use, its origin and the range of meanings attached to it. Williams hoped another form of presentation could be devised for the book, to reflect how words form networks of meaning in relation to one another. This exhibition invents such a format, by considering words through works of art which come together in ‘clusters’ in order to explore, interrogate and expand their meaning.