CHANEL NEXUS HALL

Linder Sterling is one of Britain’s most influential and iconoclastic contemporary artists, whose work continues to provoke, inspire, and redefine representations of women in art and culture.

CHANEL Nexus Hall presents Linder: Goddess of the Mind at the Museum of Kyoto Annex during KYOTOGRAPHIE 2026, on view from 18 April to 17 May 2026. This marks the artist’s first major exhibition in Japan, which will subsequently travel to CHANEL Nexus Hall in Tokyo on 25 June 2026.

Emerging from the punk scene in 1970s Britain, Linder is celebrated for her radical use of photography and photomontage to challenge and reimagine ideas of desire and the female body. For over 50 years, Linder has spliced and assembled photomontages that remain as urgent and subversive today as when she first conceived them.

Linder: Goddess of the Mind, presented by CHANEL Nexus Hall and developed in close collaboration with the artist, brings together works that trace the evolution of her practice. Building on the momentum of Linder’s recent retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery, the presentation affirms her position as one of the great feminist mavericks of the British art scene. KYOTOGRAPHIE, the world-leading photography festival in the historic city of Kyoto, provides a new context for Linder’s ground-breaking oeuvre.

The retrospective exhibition presents key works that chart the evolution of the artist’s career. This includes the 1977 series Pretty Girls, which recontextualises images of women from erotic magazines, and The Principle of Totality (2012), in which forty-five black-and-white portraits are overlaid with lipsticked mouths, foregrounding the controlling force of the gaze and the female image as something constructed and consumed.

Linder’s distinctive visual language draws on the photographs and photomontages of Dada artists　such as Hannah Hoch and Man Ray, as well as the dreamlike provocations of the Surrealists. Treating images as malleable objects, Linder challenges conformist constraints with beauty, lightness, and humour.

Following the close of KYOTOGRAPHIE, Linder: Goddess of the Mind will travel to Tokyo, where it will be on view at CHANEL Nexus Hall from 25 June. For over 20 years, in the heart of Ginza, CHANEL Nexus Hall has showcased creativity and innovation across disciplines. Recent exhibitions include a commissioned series by photographer Roe Ethridge, the AI–centric work of Sofia Crespo and Entangled Others, and acclaimed photographer Pushpamala’s first show in Japan.