The Barbican announces Lucy Raven commission for October 2025

21 March 2025

From 9 October 2025 – 4 January 2026, the Barbican will present a new exhibition for The Curve titled ‘Lucy Raven: Rounds’. Lucy Raven brings together moving image and sculpture to examine themes of cyclical violence and unrelenting force in the formation of the Western United States.

'Rounds' presents the UK premiere of Raven’s moving image installation Murderers Bar (2025), the third instalment of her acclaimed trilogy, The Drumfire. Focusing on the biggest dam removal and river restoration project in US history, Murderers Bar captures a landscape in flux, as the dam, the immense reservoir behind it, and the river now coursing through both, are transformed through the duration of the work.

In collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the exhibition also features a newly commissioned kinetic light sculpture, Centrifuge. Like Raven’s moving image work, the piece evokes monumental industrial force and its impact on land, ecosystems and communities in the context of the Western United States.

Find out more via the Barbican.

Image: Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025, production still from moving image installation, © Lucy Raven, Courtesy of the Artist and Lisson Gallery