ORACLES, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 5th March - 14th July 2024

A set of oracle cards that harness contemporary wisdom from the Dulwich Picture Gallery collection.

ORACLES transforms Gallery 12 at Dulwich Picture Gallery into an Oracle Card reading room, inviting visitors to seek advice and wisdom from a bespoke set of oracle cards inspired by Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection.

Oracle cards are tools for contemplation and encourage us to listen to our intuition. Unlike tarot cards, which have fixed imagery and are often used to predict the future, Oracle cards offer supportive guidance. Our ORACLES set takes inspiration from the Gallery’s collection of historic paintings, and was developed through creative conversations with local community groups in Southwark, Lambeth and Lewisham. We worked with the groups to playfully explore the symbolism in the paintings from the collection, and connect the symbolism to their own lives. These deeply personal interpretations made these oracle cards a bridge and space for deep reflection and dialogue about how we live our lives now, bringing these historical paintings into a contemporary context.

The outcome is a set of cards that offer thoughtful provocations for self-reflection in our modern day lives, that become activated and dialogical when people bring a question to the cards. These intimate, honest and profound conversations happen when people make creative leaps between what they see in the cards and their own lived experience. This makes each reading subjective, opening up the work to be about anything and everything: any theme, any emotion, any question, making the entry points to this work unlimited.

For us as social practice artists, ORACLES harnesses and reflects our collective consciousness and wisdom, allowing us to find our own new ways of seeing.

Cards and graphics by Studio Hyperkit.