Minne Kersten at Ginny on Frederick
room temperature
The Greeks told the myth of a mortal woman, Psyche, whose beauty rivalled Aphrodite. She was loved by Cupid, god of desire, on the one condition that she never looked at him. Every night he came to her in darkness, and every night she obeyed. But desire became a torment. One night she could not bear it any longer and lifted a lamp to see his sleeping face. In that single act of looking, she loses him and is sent into exile, trial after trial, until the last takes her into the underworld. We inherited her name, Psyche (Ψυχή) with its Greek origins translated to ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, connected to the imagery of the moth and butterfly, insects that must be hidden in the darkness of their cocoon before they are able to fly.
A low electrical tremor hums through Where I'm Calling From. The camera drifts across the attic, casting its lens over plastic sheeting draped over shapes of collected detritus in cardboard boxes it half-conceals. Chairs are stacked as candescent light casts across the attic in an uneven way. Under the humming, another sound stirs. Much smaller and harder to place at first. Twitching and flittering. A particular percussion of wings that builds. Not loudly, nothing here is loud, but insistently, until the fluttering starts to resemble a pulse. The room, for a moment, seems to have a heartbeat that is not our own.
Kersten constructed this attic. Every board, every stacked chair, every sheet of plastic was sourced specifically to become this set. A lived-in stage that is an elaborate illusion of control and its failure. The construction of the space mirrors the construction of a mind. Both are built into something to be lived inside, but soon the system that appears stable starts, almost imperceptibly, to come apart. Desire, in Kersten's constructed world, is never a simple wanting. It is wanting, shadowed by its own self-sabotage, the same impulse that draws Psyche to lift the lamp, and that draws the moth toward the bulb that will exhaust it. The attic is whatever the psyche needs it to be.
The wallpaper lining the attic is Kersten's own. A hand-printed design patterned with moths, so faint they seem to be feeding slowly on the surface that carries them. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a woman confined to a single room begins to see in the pattern on the walls, a shape trying to get free. The wallpaper is a membrane, an in-between decoration where confinement and hallucination meet. Perhaps the attic has begun to dream the moths, or is attempting to set them free. Kersten bred the moths herself with an entomologist, over several months, while living in Paris. She slept beside the cocoons. At night they made a small, electrical, flickering sound documented in the film.
Evolution built the colourings of two eyes onto the moth's wings. Its wings watch us, though the moth has no memory to keep what it sees. Two dark circles, ringed and lidless, are meant only to make some larger creature hesitate before striking its prey. An eye that watches purely to be watched. And so the moth carries the very surface it uses to hide. We stand in the dark room and feel looked at by something that is not looking. Perhaps that is what a house does, too, watching with no mind behind it, letting us mistake its silence for attention.
Stand there long enough and the distinction stops. Who is the witness, and who is being witnessed? The moth, the wallpaper, the attic, or you?
room temperature
The Greeks told the myth of a mortal woman, Psyche, whose beauty rivalled Aphrodite. She was loved by Cupid, god of desire, on the one condition that she never looked at him. Every night he came to her in darkness, and every night she obeyed. But desire became a torment. One night she could not bear it any longer and lifted a lamp to see his sleeping face. In that single act of looking, she loses him and is sent into exile, trial after trial, until the last takes her into the underworld. We inherited her name, Psyche (Ψυχή) with its Greek origins translated to ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, connected to the imagery of the moth and butterfly, insects that must be hidden in the darkness of their cocoon before they are able to fly.
A low electrical tremor hums through Where I'm Calling From. The camera drifts across the attic, casting its lens over plastic sheeting draped over shapes of collected detritus in cardboard boxes it half-conceals. Chairs are stacked as candescent light casts across the attic in an uneven way. Under the humming, another sound stirs. Much smaller and harder to place at first. Twitching and flittering. A particular percussion of wings that builds. Not loudly, nothing here is loud, but insistently, until the fluttering starts to resemble a pulse. The room, for a moment, seems to have a heartbeat that is not our own.
Kersten constructed this attic. Every board, every stacked chair, every sheet of plastic was sourced specifically to become this set. A lived-in stage that is an elaborate illusion of control and its failure. The construction of the space mirrors the construction of a mind. Both are built into something to be lived inside, but soon the system that appears stable starts, almost imperceptibly, to come apart. Desire, in Kersten's constructed world, is never a simple wanting. It is wanting, shadowed by its own self-sabotage, the same impulse that draws Psyche to lift the lamp, and that draws the moth toward the bulb that will exhaust it. The attic is whatever the psyche needs it to be.
The wallpaper lining the attic is Kersten's own. A hand-printed design patterned with moths, so faint they seem to be feeding slowly on the surface that carries them. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a woman confined to a single room begins to see in the pattern on the walls, a shape trying to get free. The wallpaper is a membrane, an in-between decoration where confinement and hallucination meet. Perhaps the attic has begun to dream the moths, or is attempting to set them free. Kersten bred the moths herself with an entomologist, over several months, while living in Paris. She slept beside the cocoons. At night they made a small, electrical, flickering sound documented in the film.
Evolution built the colourings of two eyes onto the moth's wings. Its wings watch us, though the moth has no memory to keep what it sees. Two dark circles, ringed and lidless, are meant only to make some larger creature hesitate before striking its prey. An eye that watches purely to be watched. And so the moth carries the very surface it uses to hide. We stand in the dark room and feel looked at by something that is not looking. Perhaps that is what a house does, too, watching with no mind behind it, letting us mistake its silence for attention.
Stand there long enough and the distinction stops. Who is the witness, and who is being witnessed? The moth, the wallpaper, the attic, or you?
Koak at Union Pacific
Still Weather
A radio dial tunes to BBC News, searching for the familiar, unbroken voices channelling the airwaves to deliver the latest news. In Still Weather, however, the dial rewires and diverts, finding instead a language of weather and nature. A bird is calling out, a low thunder rumbles, wind gently whispers through the airwaves. The signal refracts as though through a prism, splitting into a chorus of sound and its component colours. Everything in Still Weather is a variation of that same principle.
The full spectrum of colour disperses across the exhibition’s paintings. But the colour is filtered, run through silt, as if clarity itself had become a kind of dishonesty. Koak began thinking towards this exhibition in the strange interval after the last U.S. election in November 2024. A stomach-drop of realising what is ahead, a slow release of dread. It is a peculiarly modern condition of living inside a future you already anticipate, with no choice but to wait for its arrival.
Still Weather
A radio dial tunes to BBC News, searching for the familiar, unbroken voices channelling the airwaves to deliver the latest news. In Still Weather, however, the dial rewires and diverts, finding instead a language of weather and nature. A bird is calling out, a low thunder rumbles, wind gently whispers through the airwaves. The signal refracts as though through a prism, splitting into a chorus of sound and its component colours. Everything in Still Weather is a variation of that same principle.
The full spectrum of colour disperses across the exhibition’s paintings. But the colour is filtered, run through silt, as if clarity itself had become a kind of dishonesty. Koak began thinking towards this exhibition in the strange interval after the last U.S. election in November 2024. A stomach-drop of realising what is ahead, a slow release of dread. It is a peculiarly modern condition of living inside a future you already anticipate, with no choice but to wait for its arrival.
Hannah Murray at Ginny on Frederick
Exhibition text
‘Murray’s artistic process begins with photographs of real friends, but once she starts painting, the figures drift from their referents. Working in oil, she draws on historical portrait techniques: a blue underpainting is followed by thin, translucent layers that slowly build the face. The blue radiates through the painted layers, giving the skin a luminescence closer to screen-glow than daylight. Her subsequent glazing smooths the features into a finish the human face rarely achieves. The skin seems to collect light like lacquer. ‘
Exhibition text
‘Murray’s artistic process begins with photographs of real friends, but once she starts painting, the figures drift from their referents. Working in oil, she draws on historical portrait techniques: a blue underpainting is followed by thin, translucent layers that slowly build the face. The blue radiates through the painted layers, giving the skin a luminescence closer to screen-glow than daylight. Her subsequent glazing smooths the features into a finish the human face rarely achieves. The skin seems to collect light like lacquer. ‘
Hannah Tilson at Cedric Bardawell
Exhibition text
‘Fabric is never still. It folds and unfolds, endlessly turning back into itself and into the materials of the world. Italian theorist Giuliana Bruno reminds us that architecture is not only about fixed form, but about the surfaces that mediate our bodily encounter with the environment. Walls, draperies, and textures act as thresholds between inner and outer, body and world. In Staged Surfaces, Hannah Tilson’s practice moves within this porous terrain, between drawing, installation, painting, fabric, and patterns that become not separate modes but entangled threads in a meshwork of living surfaces.’
Exhibition text
‘Fabric is never still. It folds and unfolds, endlessly turning back into itself and into the materials of the world. Italian theorist Giuliana Bruno reminds us that architecture is not only about fixed form, but about the surfaces that mediate our bodily encounter with the environment. Walls, draperies, and textures act as thresholds between inner and outer, body and world. In Staged Surfaces, Hannah Tilson’s practice moves within this porous terrain, between drawing, installation, painting, fabric, and patterns that become not separate modes but entangled threads in a meshwork of living surfaces.’
Noah Beyene at The Bridge Gallery, Paris
Exhibition text
“Sweden is a nation of striking contradictions. Celebrated for its liberal ideals, social welfare, and cultural traditions, it is simultaneously grappling with the rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats, a party that has fuelled anti-immigrant sentiment. Noah Beyene was born to a Swedish mother and an Ethiopian father, and growing up in Stockholm, he never quite felt “Swedish enough”, a sense of displacement that informs the deeply reflective work presented in this exhibition.”
Exhibition text
“Sweden is a nation of striking contradictions. Celebrated for its liberal ideals, social welfare, and cultural traditions, it is simultaneously grappling with the rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats, a party that has fuelled anti-immigrant sentiment. Noah Beyene was born to a Swedish mother and an Ethiopian father, and growing up in Stockholm, he never quite felt “Swedish enough”, a sense of displacement that informs the deeply reflective work presented in this exhibition.”
