CURATION: HANGOVER SQUARE
During February 2025 I curated HANGOVER SQAURE with the artist Hang Zhang. The exhibition was held at The Florence Trust in Islington, London. Zhang invited me to curate the exhibition after working together on my Mercer Gallery exhibition TOTAL RECALL. HANGOVER SQUARE presents a range of work from Zhang's practice: older work, PhD research pieces, and site specific new installations.
HANGOVER SQUARE is organised into three distinct zones, the audience is encouraged to progress through a series of installations that progressively reveal increasingly vulnerable themes, thoughts, and experiences that have defined Zhang’s life.
The first room is centred around a dollhouse filled with rooms of miniature artwork given by other Yorkshire based artist friends of Zhang. Each piece highlights an aspect within the emotional network that Zhang has built. Representing the long journey that Zhang has been on in the UK, particularly the formative influence of the Leeds art scene. Soothing and supportive, these friendships create an antidote to the remoteness of migration.
Subsequently, the audience encounters Zhang's PhD research artwork, relating to Peruvian culture and llamas.
Finally, the visitor navigates into the large darkened final room, we discover works that explore the inner self of Zhang. Glowing in a bath of neon light are a series of installations that comment on transnational experiences and reconnecting with a traumatised self. Out of abandoned, unwanted, and broken material, these sculpted forms reveal Zhang’s determination to rebuild an internal world for an inner self that has been screaming out for acceptance and place. Vignettes of interconnected emotions pepper the room, emulating the complicated intertwined nature of traumatic experiences that are often only revealed during the conscious act of therapizing the mind. Ever-present is a feeling of uncertainty; elements within each sculpture threaten their own structural stability. Revealing the true fragility of existing across transcultural transnational socialised experiences, these installations express tentative hope of overcoming adversity.
The opening night was well attended and featured a poetry reading by Danielle Wilde, a London based Yorkshire poet.