This Is All Folk: Curator and Mythology Designer Marina Warner Creates Space for Stories | art

MAriana Warner has spent her life studying the cultural and psychological uses of fairy tales, whether about fairies, ghosts, or the lives of saints. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that The Shelter of Stories, a new exhibition curated by the leading mythology designer, has plenty of spine-tingling as well as fantasies-tickling.

There are artworks inspired by alternative folkloric worlds by major contemporary artists such as Paola Rego or Kiki Smith, while older paintings confront spiritual or social horrors. It features a wide range of unconventional ephemera as well, including Red Riding Hood as a board game for early children, taxidermy figures with a rodent fortuneteller and a bird love potion peddler. The curator’s collection of Mexican “Ex Voto” paintings shows how ordinary people signed up and gave thanks to overcome their own tragedies, whether it was a fire or an uncomfortable spouse.

The works span centuries, but Warner is driven by present-day concerns. It was her latest project with refugees, Stories in Transit, that prompted her to create the show, which follows her recent book Sanctuary in deconstructing how storytelling can build bridges in an increasingly divided world. “Story Shelter is about a tale told in a circle of listeners, all of whom remember, embellish and shape the story, with connections created between strangers by doing it together,” she explains. Thus, the exhibition’s focus is less on what stories are being told than on how they are told.

The connection between storytelling and refuge is emphasized through artworks such as Yinka Shonibare’s recreation of historic safe houses, including a waypoint on the Underground Railroad used by enslaved Africans escaping to the American North, and Munira El Solh’s textiles, which hang from the ceiling in a tent-like shape. Their embroideries and screen-printed lettering reference the conflict in Lebanon and the mythology and history that revolves around the cedar tree on the country’s flag.

Although such works touch on real events, the type of storytelling that interests Warner is not eyewitness accounts. While she stresses that “testimony is vital to each person’s character and appearance,” she argues that a legal framework that requires refugees to repeatedly narrate their circumstances in this way, without any deviation or change, is “a reduction in our freedom as individuals because we all tell our stories differently to different people.”

What Warner posits is the ability of storytelling to create an imaginative space in which “we reach beyond the boundaries of our own experience.” It’s a point exemplified by the sheer variety of props on display through which narrators bring the characters to life, from Punch and Judy to Indonesian shadow puppets used in Sanskrit Hindu tales, or headdresses from Yoruba Igungun masquerade ceremonies in Nigeria.

The exhibition is also a reminder of the storytelling tradition that gives the oppressed an outlet. “Laughter is a corrective to abusive power,” says Warner. “It is a refuge for the vulnerable, the disenfranchised, and anyone who is being crushed.” The show mines the ancient art of satire, from animalistic with human follies in cautionary tales like Aesop’s Fables to political satire in Jonathan Baldock’s giant mask installation “Ba Abu” from 2015, which revives the impulsive tyrant from Alfred Jarry’s absurdist 1886 play “Ubu Roy.”

The tyrannical Baldoc with the red, lolling tongue recalls today’s King Opus and their divisive and polarizing narratives. What underpins the sheer diversity of stories presented here, from Greek epics to the Brothers Grimm, is that they are collective efforts, cross-pollinated travel tales traversed across different places and cultures, with concerns faced by people gathered around the fireplace. Warner cites a famous phrase by playwright Bertolt Brecht as a guideline: “In dark times, will there be singing? Yes, there will be singing, too. About dark times.”

Shelter of stories: Routes of the Tenement Roads of Compton Verney, Warwick, October 25 Until February 22.

Harmony of Myth: the works presented in the exhibition

Paola Rego: Secrets and Stories, 1989 (main photo)
Rigaud depicts her gathered women and children telling tales like little islands in the darkness, their joyful faces seeming to be lit with joy at what they hear. “It’s about personal stories and alternative informal networks,” says Warner.

Saad Qureshi: A Handful of Heaven, 2024
Inspired by conversations with people of all faiths, A Handful of Heaven by Bradford-born sculptor Saad Qureshi is an exquisitely detailed landscape with a delicate tower set in enclosed gardens. Fittingly for the dream of a promised land, carried through life and the relief of struggles both great and daily, it is housed in an old wooden staircase attached to bicycle wheels for easy transportation.

Two masks representing spiritual figures by Norman Heywood Hardy, circa 1896-1899
Masks are one of the oldest storytelling aids explored in the show, enabling narrators to transcend their immediate reality, take on other identities, or, as with this Victorian portrait from the Pitt Rivers Museum, channel otherworldly forces.

Kiki Smith: Residence, 2015
This comes from a series of tapestries where the American artist looked at textile work in the traditions of the Middle Ages and the hippie movement. Her fox seems less a trickster of Aesop’s fables than a mysterious spirit in the winter forest.

Susan Moxley Baghdad Sorcerer, 2003
South African artist Susan Moxley began her series of prints in Baghdad in response to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Her images are inspired by a 13th-century illuminated manuscript depicting Kalila and Dimna, Persian animal fables dealing with the follies of man.