Reflections: Sangat and the Self at The Whitworth

We’re more divided and more lonely than ever. Art can do something about it.

This is the driving idea of Reflections – Sangat and the Self, developed by without SHAPE without FORM, an assembly of artists and thinkers rooted in Sikh philosophy, and the Whitworth. It brings together paintings by Manchester-born, London-based Jasmir Creed and installations by Birmingham-based Roo Dhissou – and invites you to lie down in the middle of them.

Creed’s figurative oil paintings explore emotional intensity, self-awareness and the role of introspection in healing. They often situate their subjects in the urban crowd: Tube carriages, public squares, the spaces where people are physically proximate but otherwise disconnected. Her large-scale Transience (2024) is characteristic – an expressionless face among passengers absorbed in their own worlds. “There are two different types of time in the work,” she says, “the fastness of tube time combined with the slowness of people’s thoughts.”

Where Creed turns inward, Dhissou turns outward, seeing community as a vital space of support and renewal. Her installation A String of Love is a hand-woven manjha (a traditional South Asian daybed) surrounded by cloud-like sculptural forms beneath a painted sky. Dhissou herself plays the taus, a Sikh string instrument, on the soundtrack. You’ll hear it as you lie down on the manjha, alongside whoever else happens to be there, in a shared space of care and contemplation.

Threading through both artists’ work is the Whitworth’s own collection – more than 20 pieces by Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley, Chris Ofili, Anish Kapoor and others, consciously recruited into the exhibition to support an environment of attentiveness and presence. The show describes them as medicine for the mind: familiar works asked to do something more than they usually would.

Without SHAPE without FORM contribute their own works to the space. An animation film called A Storm Within explores the nature and impact of thought, while the Whisper Box invites you to sit in silence with no external distractions – a simple demonstration that quieting the body and quieting the mind are two very different things.

The exhibition’s title is a clue to how it’s structured. Sangat is the Punjabi word for fellowship, the gathered community. Sitting alongside the Self, it suggests that neither can be understood without the other. It’s one of three Sikh teachings that structure the show, each with a specific practice attached: the daybed enacts Sangat; the Whisper Box and animation film are direct tools for Simran (meaning focused practice); without SHAPE without FORM itself, run by volunteers, embodies Seva (selfless service). See it as 500 years of Sikh wisdom put to work in a gallery.

The exhibition runs until August 2027, and a year-long public programme runs with it – talks, workshops, wellbeing sessions and a podcast and magazine series bringing together artists, health practitioners and community figures. The intention is that the wellbeing the show promotes is actively enacted around it: less a project about community than one genuinely for it. And the Whitworth, founded in 1889 for “the perpetual gratification of the people of Manchester”, feels like its natural home.

A year is a long time for an exhibition. Long enough to do a lot of good.