'A Needle Walks into a Haystack' was an exhibition about our habits, our habitats, and the objects, images, relationships and activities that constitute our immediate surroundings. It was about effecting larger questions facing contemporary life and art, from an intimate and tangible scale that’s within everyday reach.

The artists in this exhibition disrupted many of the conventions and assumptions that usually prescribe the way we live our lives. They attacked the metaphors, symbols and representations that make up their own environment, replacing them with new meanings and protocols: bureaucracy became a form of comedy, silence became a type of knowledge, domesticity became a place of pathology, inefficiency became a necessary vocation, and delinquency became a daily routine.

‘A Needle Walks into a Haystack’ included a group show, four monographic presentations (Jef Cornelis, Sharon Lockhart, Claude Parent and James McNeill Whistler), and a show curated from the Tate Collection with works by over 50 artists.