About this Event
An exciting opportunity to listen to Turner Prize–nominated and exhibiting artist Delaine Le Bas in conversation with Clémentine Deliss, the international curator, cultural theorist, and author of the Metabolic Museum. The event will take place as part of the public events programme for exhibition Delaine Le Bas: .
Delaine and Clémentine, will be joined by Valentin Diakonov, Curator (Modern & Contemporary Art at the Whitworth), who will chair a discussion on the possibilities that emerge when artists work with museum collections.
Both have long engaged with collections as sites of experimentation and the ion conversation will reflect on how artists can disrupt bureaucratic classifications, a principle central to her idea of the Metabolic Museum, a model that centres collections as being fluid, and open to reinterpretation. Drawing on works from the Musgrave-Kinley Outsider Art Collection included in Un-Fair-Ground, Delaine also raises questions around ownership and ethics, particularly in relation to neurodivergent artists.
Together they will consider how museums might balance conservation and safety with the need to open collections to multiple, sometimes challenging perspectives.
📅 Thursday 23 April
⏰ 6:30pm-8pm (doors open at 6pm)
📍 The Whitworth
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Delaine Le Bas
Turner Prize nominee (2024) Delaine Le Bas, born in Worthing and trained at St Martin's School of Art, London, has been creating immersive, multi-disciplinary installations since 1988, working with fabric, film, performance, painting, photography, and sculpture. She was one of sixteen artists in Paradise Lost at the First Roma Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2007), and collaborated with her late husband Damian Le Bas on projects including Safe European Home?, Frontier De Luxe, and Roma Armee (Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin, 2017). Her work has appeared at major international venues including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, Secession Vienna, and the Prague, Venice, and Gwangju Biennales. Solo shows include Delainia17071965Unfolding at Tramway (Glasgow International, 2024) and Incipit Vita Nova at Tate Britain (2024–25). In 2025 she was in residence at The White House, Dagenham, creating A Stranger in Silver, Walking on Air and presenting Fabricating My Own Myth: Red Threads & Silver Needles at Newcastle Contemporary Art, while also exhibiting at Frieze London and working in Celle Ligure, Genoa. Her work is held in collections including The British Council, MUCEM, and Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.
Clémentine Deliss
Dr Clémentine Deliss works across the borders of contemporary art, curatorial practice, and publishing. She is Curator-at-Large at KANAL – Centre Pompidou in Brussels, where she is preparing Département des Pièges, an exhibition of the Metabolic Museum–University for the opening of KANAL in November 2026. She is also KANAL Guest Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Between 2020 and 2023, she was Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, where she curated the exhibition Skin in the Game, featuring prototype works by six women artists. From 2010 to 2015, she was Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main, where she established a new transdisciplinary lab to remediate collections within a post-ethnological paradigm, collaborating with a wide range of artists, lawyers, and writers, including Otobong Nkanga, Luke Willis Thompson, and El Hadji Sy. Her book The Metabolic Museum was published by Hatje Cantz in 2020.
About the venue
The Whitworth is a venue with level access throughout, and facilities to support you during your visit. Alongside this our visitor team will be on hand to assist you in the gallery. Find out more about planning your visit to the Whitworth and accessibility information for you.
If you’d like to speak to a team member about any access or additional needs, please get in touch with the gallery and we will be happy to assist you. Email [email protected] or telephone 0161 275 7450.
The Whitworth art gallery and gardens is driven by a mission to work with communities to use art for positive social change, and actively addresses what matters most in people’s lives. We are proudly part of The University of Manchester, operating as a convening space between the University and the people of the city.
Image Credit: Un-Fair-Ground exhibition preview event at the Whitworth 2026. Photo: David Oates
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Whitworth, Oxford Road, Manchester, United Kingdom
GBP 3.00 to GBP 16.76
