Rory Pilgrim (Bristol, 1988) works in a wide range of media including songwriting, composing music, film, music video, text, drawing and live performances. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Pilgrim works with others through different methods of dialogue, collaboration and workshops. In an age of increasing technological interaction, Rory’s work creates connections between activism, spirituality, music and how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens.
Rory Pilgrim was recently been nominated for the Turner Prize 2023 for their Serpentine Civic project RAFTS. Created over three years with residents of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, RAFTS was made for the exhibition Radio Ballads at Serpentine North (31 March – 29 May 2022) and Barking Town Hall (2-17 April 2022). RAFTS: Live performance took place on 26 November 2022, at Cadogan Hall.
An exhibition of their work as part of the Turner Prize Exhibition will be held at Towner Eastbourne, East Sussex, from 28 September 2023 – 14 April 2024.
Recent solo exhibitions include WAMX, Turku (2022-23), Kunstverein Braunschweig (duo-2021), Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2020), Between Bridges, Berlin (2019) Ming Studios, Boise (2019), and South London Gallery (2018). Rory has also made commissions, screenings and performances for Serpentine Galleries, London (2022), MoMA, New York (2022), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), Glasgow Film Festival (2020), Images Festival, Toronto (2019) and Transmediale Festival, HKW, Berlin (2019). In 2019, Pilgrim was the recipient of the Prix de Rome.