Lattice Structure of Space-Time
22nd November - 11th January
Lattice structure of space-time brings together works that explore structure and ritual to generate new forms and paradigms.
The group exhibition considers the creation of liminal areas of time and space, which are open to new gestures, actions or words and where reimagined new forms can be generated to dismantle and replace existing normative structures. These liminal areas, which lie at the core of cultural and aesthetic production, act as more than just mirrors reflecting the political and social systems in society that enforce and sustain structural inequalities. Instead, the exhibition considers how that anti-structural liminality enables the performance of an existential curving back on ourselves, using the potential of ritual, play, contemplation and subversiveness, to suggest radical new models.
The show takes its title from the proposed structure of space-time at its smallest level - a fabric with a lattice surface of interconnected units. The theory, which has both scientific and philosophical import, suggests that a complex interplay of different force fields ultimately affects the shape of this lattice foundation. The works in the show consider structure and ritual in various different ways, be it through reflection on a particular medium or on economic, social and cultural conditions. While some works espouse a formalistic, philosophical approach through mark making, others question deep-seated colonial constructs through architectural details and ideas of commodification. They pick apart these constructs through myth making and world building, creating liminal spaces for interrogating contemporary narratives and evolving rituals. Desire and play are also explored as pathways to creating spaces where reality is suspended and transcendence or transformation occur. Window-like facades, open onto sites where memories of place, art-historical allusions, erasure, revolution and nostalgia all appear to coexist. Some works explore the structure and actions of resistance, through a consideration of linguistics, the generative potential of miscommunication and the foregrounding of disobedience and refusal. Botanical matter becomes its own protagonist to explore fire as an ecological shape-shifter, while deconstructing ideas of inhabitation and bringing to mind the precarity and distress of our changing ecosystems. In the exhibition, botanical matter is also examined as a colonial archive, witness, and site for generating modes of resistance. There is a juxtaposition of ideas that play with fractured forms and familiar terrains, through various printing processes, to interrogate diasporas and temporality. Running throughout is a transnational narrative, connecting people and places, inspired by the nonlocal interconnectedness of the space-time theory itself.
Artist Bios
Alia Hamaoui (b. 1996, France) is a British/Lebanese artist living and working in London, UK. Hamaoui completed her undergraduate studies at Camberwell College of Arts, and is currently studying for an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. Hamaoui looks to the politics behind the decorative and uses materially rich sculptural amalgamations that push and pull between tricks of haptic allure with forms of flattening. She is interested in how the cultural industry fuses the old and the familiar as a form of control, particularly in regards to the SWANA region. To question this, she dislocates artefacts central to cultural myth making into liminal architecture and everyday spatial delineations, presenting different configurations that offer alternative entry points to our past and present. Hamaoui asserts the effect of this by folding body, heritage and space into inseparable abstracted entanglements.
Recent solo exhibitions include HINO 500 at San Mei Gallery (London, 2023) and Passing Pari-daiza at Soup Gallery (London, 2023). Hamaoui has exhibited widely in London, with recent shows including Between Hands and Metal, Palmer Gallery (London 2024) and The WANAWAL Forma HQ (London 2024). As well as internationally such as Backbone, curated by Studio Salasil, Carbon 12 Gallery (Dubai 2024) and Accidentally on Purpose, Turnus Gallery x Collective Ending for Constellations (Warsaw 2024). She is also a member of the artist cooking collective, gobyfish collective.
Amba Sayal-Bennett (b. 1991, London) is a British-Indian artist working across drawing, projection, and sculptural installation. Her practice explores how methods of abstraction are exclusionary and performative, crafting boundaries between what is present, manifestly absent, and othered. Sayal-Bennett’s recent work focuses on the migration of modernist forms and their role within fascist and brutalist architecture. Using translation as a method, she explores the movement of bodies, knowledge and form across different sites, processes inherent to the diasporic experience.
Sayal-Bennett lives and works in London. She received her BFA from Oxford University and her MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art. She was awarded her PhD in Art Practice and Learning from Goldsmiths and has published her practice-based research with Tate Papers. Between January and March 2022, she was The Derek Hill Foundation scholar at the British School at Rome in Italy. Recent exhibitions include Artist’s Rooms, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE, 2024; Between Hands and Metal, Palmer Gallery, London, 2024; Dispersive Acts, TARQ, Mumbai, 2024; Seeded Futures, Arboreal Drifts, DIANA, New York, 2024; Architectures of Excess, Carbon12, Dubai, 2023; Geometries of Difference, Somerset House, London, 2022; Horror in the Modernist Block, IKON, Birmingham, 2022; My Mother Was a Computer, Indigo+Madder, London, 2022; and Tomorrow, White Cube, London, 2021.
Anwar Jalal Shemza (b. 1928 Simla, died 1985 Stafford), is a world-renowned British Pakistani painter. There has been greater recognition of his work since his death in 1985 beginning with the pioneering exhibition ‘The Other Story’ 1989, Hayward Gallery. Shemza’s painting ‘The Wall’ was chosen to illustrate the cover of the catalogue. His unique style developed through a painting practice which fused Western ideas of abstraction with Eastern influences such as Islamic architecture and calligraphy.
Selected public collections include: Tate, British Museum (UK), Metropolitan Museum, (USA), Guggenheim (Abu Dhabi), Sharjah Art Foundation, and M+ Museum, (Hong Kong).
The Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza is represented by Hales Gallery (London) and Jhaveri Contemporary (London, India).
Dilara Koz (b. Ankara, 1998) lives and works in London. She makes installations (placements) and artists books, occasionally delivering performance-lectures. Dilara’s practice moves between observation of space and its documentation, oftentimes resulting in derealised images that disrupt the conventional definition of its contents, or works of text that strive towards diluting signification.
Dilara has recently exhibited at FreyaALT, GlogauAIR, Berlin (2024), I Never Read, Basel (2024), Caressed and Polished and Drained and Washed, FILET, London (2024), Border_less, Istanbul (2024) and will be taking part in the Bound Art Book Fair, Manchester (2024). Her editions are housed in the Special Collections of the Bodleian Library, Oxford and Athens Art Book Library.
Harun Morrison (b. London) is an artist and writer based in London and an associate artist with Greenpeace UK on the project Bad Taste. His work is currently on show with Devonshire Collective in the solo exhibition Conjunction in Eastbourne. In 2024, he was in a two person show, DONO, at Somerset House Studios project space G31, alongside Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works. Recent group exhibitions include Sonic Acts, 2024: The Spell of The Sensuous, Amsterdam, Chronic Hunger / Chronic Desire in Timișoara, Romania and BALATORIUM Disturbed Waters, in Veszprém, Hungary as part of the European Capital of Culture 2023 programme, Bamako Biennial, 2020 in Mali, and Storm Warning: What does climate change mean for coastal communities? at Focal Point / Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include, Dolphin Head Mountain at the Horniman Museum, London (2022 -23), Mark the Spark at Nieuwe Vide in Haarlem, Netherlands (2022) and Experiments with Everyday Objects, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, (2021). Harun is currently co-developing community gardens in Merseyside for Bootle Library and Mind Sheffield, a mental health support service, as part of the Arts Catalyst research project, Emergent Ecologies.
Junyi Lu (b. 1996, Guangzhou, China) lives and works in London. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018 and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2023. Her practice examines the proximity between one and the world, encompassing mixed-media
painting and sculpture. Adopting a psychoanalytic methodology, her work explores the meanings embedded in the folding of memory, fantasy, anxiety, and grief across various times and spaces, both personal and political. Through an acute sensitivity to colour and materials, she has developed a unique language of poetic simplicity that reflects the multi-layered experience of being alive today.
Lu was a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2022. Her work has been collected and exhibited internationally, including at LINSEED Projects in Shanghai, Indigo+Madder in London, and Gajah Gallery in Yogyakarta.
Laila Tara H (b.1995, London/Tehran) lives and works in London. She deconstructs the aesthetic framework of the Indo-Persian miniature tradition, hybridizing traditional painting methods with radically contemporary compositions and concepts. Tara H’s imagery is composed of repeated motifs that, once recognized, become a visually and politically charged lexicon by which to 'read' the work. Conceptually the paintings interrogate the quiet politics of the domestic sphere and the tension that exists between the personal and public realm. Often monumental in scale, comprising multiple parts and incorporating sculptural elements, her practice challenges our traditional perception of what constitutes a work on paper.
Recent solo and duo exhibitions include 2002, Cooke Latham Gallery, London, 2024; Hastan/هستن (with Narges Mohammadi), Copperfield, London, 2023; Twisted toes, tangled ears (with Anousha Payne), Public Gallery, London, 2022; Group exhibitions include Time Future, Purdy Hicks, and Alberto Di Castro, London, 2024; Utopia, Incubator, London, 2024; Blue, Purdy Hicks, London, 2024; India Art Fair, Indigo+Madder, Delhi, 2024; Time Future, Alberto Di Castro, Rome, 2023; Sum, Sarabande Foundation, London, 2023; New Ancients, Guts Gallery, London, 2023; Nay, her foot speaks, Cooke Latham Gallery, London, 2023 and Anousha Payne, Laila Tara H, Isabella Ducrot, Super Super Markt, Berlin, 2023.
Noorain Inam (b. 1998, Karachi) lives and works in London. Her painting practice explores the construction of identity and belonging through a layering of cultural references and contexts. Inam creates uncanny, surreal and destabilising spaces by bringing together deeply personal experiences, storytelling and symbolic motifs. Exploring themes of longing and fear, these phantasmagorical worlds are a meeting ground for imagination and lived reality.
In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Residency Award for Emerging Artists which includes a three-month Residency at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives. Inam received an MFA Painting from Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2022 and a BFA from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi in 2019. Through these experiences, she melds miniature painting techniques with Western expressive gestural painting styles, to create complex emotional landscapes. Selected exhibitions include Lattice structure of space-time, Indigo+Madder, London, 2024; Go back to sleep, it's just the wind, Indigo+Madder, London, 2024; Prophetic Dreams, Kutlesa Gallery, Switzerland, 2024, A dream that visited every night, Indigo+Madder, London in January 2023; Shining Light and Bloomsbury Festival Prize Winner Presentation, London, 2021.
Motunrayo Akinola (b. 1992. London) is a London-based artist who uses images of the home and everyday materials in his work. He explores timelines of access, comfort and belonging, using historical imagery and or text to contextualise narratives of today - thinking predominantly in sculpture, installation, sound and drawings. Akinola’s work is activated by re-contextualising familiar objects, interrupting quick associations and creating point of access into othered perspectives. Previous work has used food, domestic objects and packing materials. As a British-born Nigerian who feels comfortable in both spaces, Akinola’s work investigates systems and subtle cultural codings which work to maintain a sense of othering. He aims to create spaces which help question current society’s position on contemporary issues.
After graduating from Royal Academy Schools in 2023, Akinola recently completed a residency culminating in his solo show Knees Kiss Ground at South London Gallery (2024). Recent exhibitions also include UPPER AND LOWER CENTRAL, Blank Projects, Cape Town, South Africa, 2024 and New Contemporaries, Mirror, Plymouth, U.K, 2024.
Rae-Yen Song’s (b. 1993, Edinburgh) lives and works in Glasgow. Her world-building practice happens first through drawing, and then expansively through sculpture, installation, textile, video, sound and performance, with the assembling of speculative, sensual spaces which envelop audiences. Rae-Yen draws on a Daoist worldview, the immigrant experience, and a concern for multi-species entanglement in visioning alternative ways of being and belonging.
Work has been shown at CCA Glasgow (2024), Mead Gallery, Coventry (Hayward Gallery Touring, 2024-26), Royal Scottish Academy (2024), Aspex Portsmouth (2023), FACT Liverpool (2022), Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2022), Quench Gallery, Margate (2022), Dundee Contemporary Arts (2021), LUX Scotland & BBC Scotland (2021), Glasgow International (2021), esea contemporary, Manchester (2020), Edinburgh Art Festival (2018; 2020), Jerwood Arts, London (2018). Residencies include Porthmeor Studios x Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Residency (2024), LaunchPad LaB, France (2022), Talbot Rice Residents (2019-2021), Hospitalfield (2019), Sura Medura, Sri Lanka (2017).
Sahej Rahal (b. 1988, India) lives and works in Mumbai, India. Sahej Rahal’s works are characterised by surreal propositions and alternate worlds, which seem to be situated in an unfamiliar future, while firmly rooted in lessons from the past. Rahal describes his recent body of work as a ‘growing mythology’, one that is influenced by his deep interests in science fiction and contemporary new materialist philosophy, along with a critical engagement with the role of technology in our day-to-day lives, as well as a dark sense of humour.
Rahal’s group and solo exhibitions include the Biennial of Moving Images at Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Gwangju Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne, and CCA Glasgow. He is the recipient of the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant, the Digital Earth Fellowship, the first Human-Machine Fellowship organised by Junge Akademie ADK, and the Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellowship.
Steven He (b. 1994, Shanghai, China) lives and works in London. He creates installations, sculptures, and paintings that explore complexities and contradictions within cultures, with a focus on community, memory, and the elusive origins of shared ideas. Fascinated by the power of folktales and stories to transmit traditions over generations, he collects and reinterprets these narratives, uncovering both the tales that endure and those that nearly fade from memory. Through ambiguity and open-endedness, he captures the beauty in what is unrefined, tracing how ideas diverge and evolve over time. By embracing the blurred lines and contradictions in communication, He invites a more inclusive and interconnected expression of the human experience.
He received his MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2022 and his BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Merit Scholarship Recipient) in 2016. Recent exhibitions include Occult Surge, Moosey Gallery, London, 2024; Stove by a Whale, Staffordshire St, London, 2024, Volatile Futures, Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop, London, 2023, Well Worn, SET Ealing, London, 2023 and Lapped Seams & Silver Linings, Standpoint Gallery, London, 2022.