Change Ringing, presented at Serpentine South, brings together painting, sculpture, printmaking, sound and film. Justin Caguiat engages with the gallery with its architecture and infrastructure to frame and display his artworks. He is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the relationship between architecture, spirituality and rituals.
 
Alongside canvases, sculptures and prints, Caguiat also shows a series of bronze bells cast in the shapes of various flowers and plant seeds varying in size. A score composed by Lily Pickett riffs on the logic of English change ringing, playing mechanically in a continuous loop as pistons fire in sequential code. Like the concrete acoustic mirrors built along Britain’s coastline to detect warships, or Le Corbusier’s conception of a building as an acoustic receiver, the gallery’s walls gather and amplify the bells’ chimes, transforming architecture into a listening instrument.
 
An evolution of Zodiac Machine (4 March – 1 April 2026; Madrid), the exhibition organised by Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid, across the Santa Ana y la Esperanza Church, the nearby Moratalaz Market, and surrounding public spaces, the Serpentine show continues Caguiat’s longstanding exploration of the architecture, spiritual resonance, and symbolic qualities of sacred spaces, alongside the structures and rhythms of everyday urban infrastructure. Devised as a project in two parts taking place in the two institutions, Caguiat’s new body of works was influenced by the Spanish architect Justo Gallego Martínez, specifically his Catedral de Justo, which he designed and built single-handedly using only recycled and found materials.

Change Ringing also includes a new site-specific installation of thermochromic paintings. Painted with heat-responsive pigments on copper, rudimentary heating pads and microcontrollers occupy various areas of the exhibition space and are triggered by the chimes of the bells. Once triggered, the copper panels are heated, shifting the colours and forms visible. These system-based works react to the ambient temperature in the room, which influences their transition from reactive to stable.

Installed throughout the galleries are a series of paintings, monumental in scale, evoking murals or expansive landscapes. Suprising and mesmerising.

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Images: Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing, installation view, Serpentine South, 2026. Courtesy Serpentine. Photo: George Darrell