Justin Caguiat Makes Painting Respond to Sound at Serpentine
Change Ringing connects bronze bells, heat-sensitive colour and the gallery’s exposed structure in a London exhibition that unfolds through time.
An exhibition with changing conditions
Justin Caguiat’s Change Ringing opened at Serpentine South on 8 October 2026 and continues until 10 January 2027. Bringing painting, sculpture, sound, film and printmaking together, the installation treats the gallery as an active component. Bronze bells and paintings made with temperature-sensitive pigments introduce a simple complication for the viewer: an image can change while one is looking at it. The show is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Natalia Grabowska, with Alexa Chow, bringing an architectural curatorial perspective into the project’s institutional framework.
The project gives duration a material role. Returning to a work becomes an opportunity to register a different state. That is a particularly relevant proposition within an exhibition culture often encountered through a single still image. The announced mechanics suggest an experience whose relationships need time to become apparent, even when an individual object is immediately engaging.
A 2025 print, Untitled 7 (Alphabet of Dots), offers a static comparison for those changing surfaces: its circular forms remain fixed on paper.
The bell and the painted surface
Serpentine credits composer Lily Pickett with a score drawing on English change ringing. Bells shaped after flowers and plant seeds are struck mechanically in changing sequences. The gallery guide explains that heat pads behind the copper paintings respond when corresponding bells sound, altering the thermochromic pigments before the works cool again. The series is called Hysteresis Loop.
This mechanism creates a connection between hearing and seeing without making the painting an illustration of a melody. A sound triggers a physical process, and the surface registers its consequences. Colour becomes an event with a beginning and an afterlife. The result can be read as an invitation to notice the delay between an action and the transformation that follows it.
A building shows its working parts
The exhibition guide also records changes to Serpentine South itself. Ahead of an already planned renovation, plasterboard has been removed from parts of three rooms, exposing original brickwork and later alterations. Paintings attach to metal supports, while materials from previous exhibitions are reused for benches and vitrines.
The approach makes the supporting space newly legible. A wall is usually expected to withdraw behind an artwork; here, its construction and history enter the field of attention. The display can therefore be considered through two kinds of change at once: temporary transformations in the artworks and accumulated alterations within the architecture that contains them.
From Madrid’s neighbourhood to London’s gallery
Change Ringing develops ideas from Zodiac Machine, presented in Madrid earlier this year. Modern Art’s account of that project describes works extending through the Santa Ana y la Esperanza Church, the Moratalaz Market and surrounding public spaces. Designed by Miguel Fisac, the church was built between 1965 and 1971. The project also drew on Justo Gallego Martínez’s lifelong architectural undertaking, Catedral de Justo.
Forensics with Air gives the circular motifs another setting, within a broad field of dark and pale painted forms.
That earlier setting provides useful context for London. Caguiat’s interest moves between devotional space, everyday exchange and the systems that connect people to buildings. At Serpentine, those concerns are concentrated within an institution whose own fabric is made visible. A visitor can follow a bell, a colour change or an exposed support and arrive at the same question: how does a place acquire meaning through the actions that occur inside it? Admission to Change Ringing is free.
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