Marina Warner has spent her life studying the cultural and psychological uses of imaginative tales, be they of fairies, ghosts or saints’ lives. It’s perhaps no surprise then that The Shelter of Stories, a new exhibition curated by the leading mythographer, contains much to tingle spines as well as tickle fancies.
There are artworks drawing on alternative folkloric worlds by top contemporary artists such as Paula Rego or Kiki Smith, while old master paintings confront spiritual or social horrors. It boasts a wealth of offbeat ephemera too, including Red Riding Hood as an early kids’ board game and taxidermy dioramas with a rodent fortune teller and avian peddler of love potions. The curator’s own collection of Mexican Ex Voto paintings shows how ordinary people have recorded and given thanks for overcoming their own dramas, be it fire or an inconvenient spouse.
The works span centuries but Warner is driven by present-day concerns. It was her recent project with refugees, Stories in Transit, that prompted her to create the show, which follows her recent book Sanctuary in unpacking how storytelling can build bridges in an increasingly divided world. “The shelter of stories,” she explains, “is about a tale told in a circle of listeners, all remembering, embellishing and making up the story, with bonds created between strangers by doing it together.” Thus, the exhibition’s emphasis is less on what stories are being told than how.
The connection between storytelling and refuge is underlined by artworks such as Yinka Shonibare’s scaled-down recreations of historical safehouses, including a waypoint on the underground railway used by enslaved Africans escaping to the American north, and Mounira Al Solh’s textiles, which hang tent-like from the ceiling. Their embroideries and silkscreened lettering reference conflict in Lebanon and the myths and histories circling the cedar tree on the country’s flag.
Although such works touch on real events, the kind of storytelling that interests Warner is not the eye-witness account. While she affirms that “testimony is vital to everyone’s personhood and visibility”, she sees the legal framework that demands refugees must repeatedly recount their circumstances in this way without any deviation or change, as “diminishing our freedom as individuals because we all tell our stories differently for different people”.
What Warner makes the case for is storytelling’s potential to create an imaginative space where “we reach beyond the borders of our own experience”. It’s a point evinced by the huge variety of props on show and through which tellers bring characters to life, from Punch and Judy to Indonesian shadow puppets used in Hindu Sanskrit tales, or the headdresses from Nigeria’s Yoruba Egungun masquerades.
The exhibition is a reminder, too, of the storytelling traditions that give the downtrodden an outlet. “Laughter is a corrective to abusive power,” says Warner. “It’s the recourse of the underdog, the underprivileged, anybody who is crushed.” The show mines the age-old art of lampooning, from the animal with human follies in cautionary tales like Aesop’s Fables to the political satire in Jonathan Baldock’s giant mask installation Pa Abu of 2015, reviving the impulsive tyrant from Alfred Jarry’s absurdist 1886 play Ubu Roi.
Baldock’s despot with his lolling red tongue recalls today’s King Ubus and their divisive, polarising narratives. What undergirds the huge variety of stories on show here though, from Greek epics to the Brothers Grimm, is that they’re collective efforts, cross-pollinated travelling tales that have passed through different places and cultures, with fears faced by people getting together around the fireside. Warner cites famed lines by the playwright Bertolt Brecht as a guiding principle: “In the dark times, will there be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”
The Shelter of Stories: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling is at Compton Verney, Warwick, 25 October to 22 February.
Myth congeniality: works on display at the exhibition
Paula Rego: Secrets and Stories, 1989 (main image)
Rego depicts her huddled women and children telling tales like little islands in the dark, their rapt faces apparently illuminated by delight at what they’re hearing. “It’s about personal stories and alternative informal networks,” says Warner.
Photograph: Hugh Pryor/Photography Hugh
Saad Qureshi: A Handful of Paradise, 2024
Drawn from conversations with people of all faiths, Bradford-born sculptor Saad Qureshi’s A Handful of Paradise is an exquisitely detailed landscape with a delicate tower in enclosed gardens. Fittingly for a dream of the promised land, carried through life easing struggles both large and everyday, it’s housed in an old wood drawer fixed with bike wheels for easy transportation.
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Photograph: Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
Two masks representing spirit figures Photograph by Norman Heywood Hardy, c.1896–99
Masks are one of the oldest storytelling aids explored in the show, enabling tellers to move beyond their immediate reality, to take on other identities, or, as is the case with this Victorian photograph from the Pitt Rivers museum, channel otherworldly forces.
Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor © Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith: Sojourn, 2015
This comes from a series of tapestries where the American artist looked back to the textile works of medieval traditions and the hippy movement. Her fox seems less the wily double-crosser of Aesop’s Fables than a mysterious spirit at one with winter woods.
Photograph: Courtesy the artist
Susan Moxley Baghdad Juggler, 2003
The South African artist Susan Moxley began her Baghdad series of prints in response to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Its imagery is inspired by a 13th-century illuminated manuscript depicting the Kalila wa Dimna, Persian animal fables tackling man’s follies.
