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The Tetley Story
Colourful contemporary artwork installed in a gallery

Illustrative gallery image. resource entries use contextual imagery where installation documentation is not reproduced.

The Living and the Stale was Samra Mayanja’s first major solo exhibition. It explored experiences of loss, disorientation and being lost through an interwoven body of installations, drawings, a score and moving-image work.

Mayanja’s research considered the life and writing of Ham Mukasa, a Ugandan secretary-scribe whose travel diary documented a journey to England at the beginning of the twentieth century. The exhibition approached this historical material alongside the artist’s own later journey to Uganda and her encounters with family memory.

The resulting works connected personal and archival experience without treating either as a fixed account. Galleries operated as parts of a dispersed film, allowing fragments of narrative, observation and recollection to remain visible rather than resolving into a single conclusion.

The exhibition was presented within the Jerwood Commissions programme. This page is an independent historical summary and does not reproduce the original exhibition guide or extended source wording.

Selected views

Fragments of an exhibition

These illustrative images reflect the exhibition’s interest in colour, constructed space and the movement between personal and historical material.

Visitors looking at large-scale contemporary artworks
Installation and the experience of moving through a changing visual environment.
Layered abstract artwork in muted colours
Colour, surface and the resource as active rather than static material.
People discussing artworks in a contemporary exhibition
Shared looking and the social life of an exhibition.
Expressive painted portrait with vivid colour
Image, memory and the emotional register of historical research.

Reading the record

A dispersed film in gallery form

The exhibition brought together autobiographical journeys, historical research and moving image in a deliberately open structure. Its title set living experience beside what has become fixed, preserved or difficult to recover.

Rather than presenting the resource as complete, the works made room for gaps, partial knowledge and shifting points of view. The exhibition’s atmosphere emerged through the relationship between objects, images, text and the visitor’s route through the galleries.

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Place this exhibition within the wider record of artists, commissions and changing approaches to contemporary practice.