Mise en Abyme: London - Contemporary art through the lens of film noir

"The film's recursive narrative, where memory and image continually fold back on themselves, provided the curatorial anchor: a sense of drift in which perception cannot quite settle, and repetition becomes its own form of distortion. The title "mise en abyme" refers to this condition of infinite reflection - an image within an image, a story within a story - where nothing remains stable."

"Rather than treating works as fixed forms, the exhibition assembled conditions where images echoed, matter unsettled, and perception sliped. Recursion here was not only a visual motif but a material and psychological state: surfaces fractured, drifted, and refracted, while the edges of image and object dissolved into duplication and spectral return. Across sculpture, moving image, and installation, the exhibition unfolded less as a collection than as a recursive field, where what appeared stable was always already folded back into repetition."

"Arko Bhowmik's Lithium Futures situates ecological extraction within buried media and cinematic fragments, conjuring planetary futures through the instability of their infrastructures. Jiaqing Chen's When the Moon Rises extends this instability into vision itself, where screen-based landscapes appear and erode in cycles of clarity and loss. Anastasia Solodov's Cold Iconic Series reanimates devotional imagery in fragile materials - resin, bread, embroidered cloth - destabilising the relation between icon and objecthood."

Mise en Abyme: London at The Black Shop in King's Cross used the looping temporality of Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad as a curatorial anchor. Memory and image fold back on themselves, producing drift where perception cannot settle and repetition becomes distortion. Works were arranged to make images echo, matter unsettle, and perception slip, turning recursion into material and psychological condition. Surfaces fractured, duplicated, and refracted across sculpture, moving image, and installation. Arko Bhowmik, Jiaqing Chen, and Anastasia Solodov presented works that link ecological, perceptual, and devotional instability through fragile and hybrid materials and technologies.

Read at CreativeApplications.Net