MY ROOM IS A WHITE THING WITH WALLS VAGUELY WHITE

A group exhibition featuring works by five international, London-based artists, this exhibition invites the audience to interrogate their psychological and physical dimensions, reflecting on how different places and non-places affect how we feel and behave: nostalgic, sheltered, guilty, curious, threatened, homesick, playful, disoriented.

The title borrows a verse from ‘The Keeper of Sheep’, a collection of poems by Fernando Pessoa. In the poem, the narrator suddenly wakes at night to find themselves in a non-place populated by both silence and the rhythmic ticking of a watch. In this half-asleep state, the character begins to question their existence and the world’s larger meaning.

Similarly, each artist in the exhibition questions the lived experience of place, placelessness and the ambiguous, liminal states in-between: whether through spontaneous wanderings, the search for hidden clues in found objects, everyday ritualistic gestures, reflections on the meaning of home, feelings of contemporary exile, or latent threats.

The selected works – spanning sculpture, painting, textile, writing, and moving image, explore our emotional inwardness as we navigate the semantics of external tangible and symbolic environments. They present a reflection on the entangled relationships between our inner selves and the world we inhabit through a curious, multi-dimensional dialogue.

Each artist uses a variety of signifiers and techniques to engage with overlapping themes such as memory, self-perception, identity, and the shifting meanings of objects and materials when extracted from their usual context – blurring the lines between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the known and the unknown, the conscious and the unconscious.