A collaboration between Maison GB and The Handbag Factory
Curated By Noor Albar and Hyunwoo Lim
“In an age where certainty is increasingly elusive, responding to uncertainty is no longer a philosophical abstraction: it is a practical necessity. Can we learn to live within the unknown, rather than rush to resolve it? Art offers a space for experimentation, one that embraces discomfort not as failure, but as a catalyst for shifting perception, sensation, and thought. Provisional We begins here: with the tension of care in a time when otherness is still erased or overlooked.
Philosopher Jacques Pezeu-Massabuau describes discomfort as an invitation to rethink our relationship with the world, rather than something to be avoided. This sensibility informs the curatorial ethos of Provisional We, questioning the urgency and discomfort of care in the present moment. We are often taught that empathy is the starting point of ethical care – that to understand another’s pain is to begin to heal. But what if that very assumption is part of the problem? Is empathy always virtuous? What or whom do we erase when we centre understanding as a condition for solidarity?
Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia – ‘other spaces’ that reflect, invert, or disrupt dominant social orders – offers a framework. He identified institutions such as libraries, prisons, and gardens as heterotopias: spaces that isolate or accumulate, while quietly mirroring and questioning societal norms. For Foucault, space is a means of control, a staging ground for order. We might further add: these are spaces that appear only when needed, and only to those who seek them.
Yet today, these spaces often operate as zones of emotional consumption. Aruna D’Souza’s essay Imperfect Solidarities addresses this directly, critiquing the idea that empathy must be the foundation of political alliance. She instead calls for solidarities that do not require self-disclosure or translation – solidarities that allow people to exist without being consumed or explained. From her perspective, empathy frequently demands labour from the oppressed, absorbing their narratives into dominant frameworks of whiteness, privilege, and spectacle.
Provisional We draws from Foucault’s heterotopic thinking, Pezeu-Massabuau’s invitation to reframe discomfort, and D’Souza’s critique of affective politics. It confronts the asymmetries that arise when the viewer positions themselves as ‘the one who understands,’ and instead proposes not understanding as a curatorial stance. Refusing resolution, it embraces opacity as an ethical gesture – one that leaves room for difference, dissonance, and the fragile, shifting possibility of a We.”
Imperfect, Impermanent and Incomplete
This group exhibition, curated by RCA curating students Noor Albar and Hyunwoo Lim opens with a provocation: What if empathy isn’t enough? More than that – what if it’s part of the problem?
Set in the industrial shadows of The Handbag Factory, this group exhibition resists the usual calls for connection (or control) through comprehension, drawing together a diverse cohort of international artists working across installation, sculpture, moving image, performance, and print. Their common ground isn’t a theme but an atmosphere: an allegiance to discomfort, ambiguity, and resistance to resolution.
This is a curatorial proposition that’s philosophical but not abstract. It plays out physically across the exhibition space as viewers are left to navigate works that don’t spell themselves out, and resist being pinned to one narrative. That refusal becomes a form of ethical friction – not to alienate, but to create space for difference to breathe.
Maliha Abidi’s richly coloured paintings and short film Shifting Shadows explore intergenerational trauma through the lens of the 1947 Partition of India. Her work recovers diasporic memory from the margins of Western historical narratives, rendering them not as historical accounts but as sites of active negotiation. Meanwhile, Farah Aljindan’s video work Mabrook drifts through grief and nostalgia using childhood objects and textures of domestic life. There’s a softness to her materials, but it’s deceptive. What looks like tenderness is also a quiet refusal to simplify memory into something digestible.
Several works explore the psychopolitics of space and sensation. Wonyoung Shim’s sculptural portals feel at once clinical and dreamlike – installations that hum with an eerie liminality, never quite resolving into meaning. Jangho Yoon’s robotic devices evoke restrained emotional states through machinery, tracing how pressure, stillness, and repetition can encode feeling without human expression. They’re not anthropomorphic. They’re affective environments, mechanical stand-ins for emotion under surveillance.
Ross Deeley’s assemblages draw from Object-Oriented Ontology and Thing Theory, collecting discarded materials, shells, metals and industrial waste in sculptural forms that act as speculative archaeology. These aren’t monuments, but micro-sites of reflection – pieces that feel like they’ve washed ashore from some alternate Anthropocene. Deeley’s interest lies not in restoring meaning to objects, but in letting their histories remain opaque, fragmented, and open-ended.
Other artists delve into sensory transformation and scale. Pan Yihan’s photographic and installation work uses microscopes and telescopes to explore matter at the edge of perception: dust, water, light. Her visual language shifts between microscopic intimacy and cosmic perspective, dissolving the boundaries between permanence and impermanence. While Meredith Gunderson brings a spiritual, esoteric dimension into play, working with ceramics, bronze, silicone, and textiles to create sculptural hybrids that feel both bodily and otherworldly – simultaneously relic and prototype.
Sensing Sensible Solidarities
What binds the show together isn’t a curatorial argument so much as a sensibility: the refusal to simplify or conclude. The artists share an investment in dissonance, in leaving things unspoken, in troubling the assumed clarity of vision that seeks to satisfy personal discomfort. Their works ask viewers not to look through them for meaning, but with them and to co-exist in the unknown.
Albar and Lim’s curatorial stance is both conceptually rigorous and politically grounded. They reject the institutional pressure to make everything legible and accessible, especially when that demand disproportionately falls on artists from marginalised backgrounds. Instead, they take the risk of discomfort seriously. Their proposition is that care can exist without comprehension, and that solidarity might begin with letting go of the need to resolve.
At a time when institutions rush to demonstrate empathy through token representation or therapeutic aesthetics, Provisional We takes a slower, stranger route. It doesn’t offer answers. But it does offer conditions for something more honest: a collective uncertainty that doesn’t collapse difference, but holds those tensions carefully.
© Batoul Albar Photography 2025
