The Place of Complete Surprise | Hosted by The Shop at Sadie Coles

Kavitha Balasingham, Shailee Mehta, Sabrina Shah, Pranshu Thakore, Leila Al-Yousuf

Hosted by
The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ
62 Kingly St, London W1B 5QN

7 October — 5 November

There Goes the Neighbourhood inaugurates Castor and Indigo + Madder’s new FitzroHosted by The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ, indigo+madder is thrilled to present The Place of Complete Surprise; a group exhibition featuring the work of five artists from the UK and India. The exhibition explores concepts related to a space of ideas and emerging possibilities. Named khôra by Plato, Derrida later described it as a radical otherness that creates place and makes space for being. The various works in the show address notions of invention, discovery, regeneration and explore a seminal place where everything passes through on its way to ‘becoming’.

Sabrina Shah’s paintings, with their bold, multi-layered paint application and varied textures, explore the territory of ideas and invention, where the absolutely new occurs. Jack in the box features characters that gaze directly at the viewer, in a scene full of motion and movement. The textured surfaces allow for slippages and tension between form and meaning. Referencing childhood memories, animated characters and make believe, her not-quite-human, not-quite-animal characters, at once familiar yet distant, personify feelings of being othered or out of place. Often incorporating elements of suspense and surprise in her narratives, Shah also references food cultures and her mixed Chinese-South Asian heritage.

Shailee Mehta’s figures are imagined in liminal, radical spaces, where nature, wildlife and bodies seem to merge. In Drenched, the shoreline, with its ceaseless crashing of waves, alludes to the passage of time, regeneration and rebirth. Two figures gaze out into the sea as another one floats away, while a bird, wings flapping, flies across the frame. The figures here seem to be detached and motionless, witnesses perhaps to their own quandary as they gaze out into the sea. There is a circularity to the composition and a collapsing of time, with multiple events playing out simultaneously - an allusion to the cyclical, always renewing nature of life. Mehta creates a dream-like narrative inspired by nostalgic memory, moments of grief, loss of love, the birth of love, regeneration and intimacy.

Leila Al-Yousuf’s paintings similarly explore notions of intimacy, depicting quiet moments that capture the sense of time and place in which they are made. In Midriff, her expressive strokes depict affection and touch, loneliness and togetherness, dappled skin covering blood vessels and beating hearts, emotions captured as flows of energy across the body. Images formed through washes of paint retain a directness and immediacy in Al-Yousuf’s work. Each mark, each hesitation remains visible, adding colour and form, which guide the next brush strokes. The act of applying paint communicates the psyche, infusing each work with a range of emotions that move past the limits of language, and create a space ripe with possibility.

Kavitha Balasingham’s sculpture do u ever wonder what it’s like to be a tulip contains an LCD screen that continuously loops a poem exploring desire, eroticism and pleasure. Through playful ideas connected to nature, of blossomed flowers and connections to the soil and earth, the tulip becomes a symbol through which emotion, pleasure, possibilities of growth, and liberation are explored. Flowers, especially tulips, to Balasingham represent her family home and connections to the earth, which seem to ground us – they indicate a sense of belonging and place. They also allude to the body, and in their blossoming and decay, present potential and possibility.

Pranshu Thakore is likewise interested in a profound connection to the natural environment and other forms of life. Her paintings incorporate a range of uninhabited and unbated expressions and borrow from the language of vernacular art. She is especially interested in how the roots of this art form seem to have evolved through an emphasis on our inextricable dependence on nature, rather than a separation from it. The Drum of Eternity brings together human and non-human, almost totemic assemblages that resemble ceremonial groupings. There is no clear separation between the various forms that combine into a wild, imaginary creature with multiple facets. They represent a kind of talismanic property for the Anthropocene, responding to an anxiety about the ecological crisis, providing protection and bringing together the raw power of nature, all at the same time.

The works in the exhibition explore emergent spaces, while bringing together elements of anticipation and tenderness and surprise to explore a charged territory of hope and possibility.