top of page

14th September - 19th October 2024

Aftershock

Fan Bangyu, Lulua Alyahya, Madeleine Bender, Ruba Nadar

This permeating yellow hue is distorting, dislocating; it urges you to proceed with caution. You now stand within a wake of an unknown aftershock.


In Aftershock, Fan Bangyu, Lulua Alyahya, Madeleine Bender and Ruba Nadar continuously fragment time and space through notions of strangeness, creating an environment that adopts a disquieting abstraction of everyday visual language.


The works in the exhibition simultaneously embrace both strange and familiar qualities exploring spatial and mental dislocation, inhabiting a space wedged between reality and its reverse. There is a static mundanity heavy in the air, encouraged by recognisable quotidian motifs: cars, household pets, a packet of lard. Yet nothing seems quite as it should be, frozen as a scrambled puzzle thawed only by the occasional drip of syrup. Tension permeates each material. Sphinx stretched tight to breaking point across the canvas surface; shrinking plastic enveloping its tightening grip around pewter bodies. 


Here each artists employs their individual methodology to welcome us in, and then throw us off course: Ruba Nadar considers the simultaneous tenderness and eroticism of cropping, through which their subjects take on a disquieting and strange language; Fan Bangyu dictates a language that evokes a mysterious atmosphere that is difficult to categorise; Lulua Alyahya’s idle subjects sit within dreamlike, nondescript backdrops in which strange yet familiar accounts of masculinity, youth, and beauty are drawn from different worlds; Madeleine Bender explores the boundaries and definitions of the body in time and space, using fragmentation as a tool to alienate personal materials from their

origins.


In their togetherness, the works shown in Aftershock are intent on dislocation, intervening into each crevice with a quiet discord.

bottom of page