In the subdued, understated interiors of Batsford Gallery, Kairós: Between Choice and Fate presents itself quietly. Nothing speaks to you loudly. Instead, this show asks for your attention; to the surface, the weight, to the way objects hold time. Curated by Huan Zhou and Qi Hui, Kairós is read more as a succession of suspended moments, a series of decisions and an inevitable future.
The works do not suggest a clear narrative path. Two wall mounted assemblage pieces sit facing each other and are contained by rigid metal grids. Compressed organic matter – dry leaves, fragments, darkened remains, press up against the latticework, frozen mid-fall. One piece includes a circular object that resembles a steering wheel or mechanical ring and although its inclusion seems purposeful, its significance is still ambiguous. Although control, motion, and direction are all suggested, they are all thwarted by being contained and immobile.
A similar dialectic exists throughout the exhibition, the relationship between containment and agency. Zhou’s role as curator is most apparent in her use of space to slow the viewer down. Works are spaced out and sight lines are created so the viewer can pause naturally. As a result, meaning develops slowly over time through repetition and proximity, not through explanation.
Across the room from these two assemblage pieces, a painting provides a new register. The organic shapes that float upon the surface are painted in vibrant hues of green, yellow, blue, and earthy red. Branching vein-like lines extend and connect forms that could be interpreted as hands, roots, or internal organs. Although the painting clearly suggests bodily connections, it does not become figurative. It suggests systems (biological, emotional, environmental) that exist independently of our conscious choices. The paint looks layered but fluid, suggesting that the forms have risen to the surface through accumulation, rather than intentionality.
Materiality becomes a means of expression in its own right. An installation comprised of long, hanging strands of fibre, weaves downward to nearly touch the ground. The strands pool softly at the base. The installation moves gently back and forth as people walk past it. It is both fragile and enduring and interrupts the space, but does not dominate it. The fibre holds memory in its wear and tear and unevenness. It appears to have been less constructed than collected, as if it was shaped by time and not by design.
Zhou’s sensitivity to the behavior of materials is central to her curatorial approach. She does not force coherence, but instead allows disparate elements to coexist in a state of uncertainty. It is here, in the moments when materials appear to be in flux, that the show’s engagement with the concept of kairós is most palpable.
Photographs hang on the walls creating a quieter and more personal tension. The cropped images of bodies, domestic environments and partial gestures appear disconnected from a linear narrative. A figure lies on a bed against a digitally rendered underwater background. A person’s limbs are framed tightly, fragmentally, and partially withheld. Unlike many photographs, these do not invite the viewer to voyeuristically enter into the depicted space. The detachment of the photographs creates a sense of distance, as if the moment has already passed.
Zhou’s restraint as curator allows the work to have its own ambiguousness and has the least amount of texts to guide the viewers interpretation of what freedom or fate is being represented by the artwork. The show does not tell the viewer how to see these concepts; instead, it builds an environment for the viewer to experience both freedom and fate as provisional and as a product of structural, emotional, and material constraints.
The connection among all of the works is not the aesthetics, but rather, the similar attention to conditionality and to how bodies, objects, and decisions function within systems larger than themselves. This is not a representation of freedom as autonomous, but rather as an evolving, momentary, and often restricted concept.
While the exhibition’s restraint is largely its strength, this same quietness can at times verge on opacity. The absence of contextual framing occasionally leaves certain works under-activated, particularly for viewers less familiar with the conceptual language of material-led practices. In a few moments, the balance between openness and withholding feels unresolved rather than productively ambiguous.
Kairós: Between Choice and Fate is successful because it declines to be resolved. Kairós does not theatrically depict its subject matter. Kairós represents its subject matter with a quietness and with a calmness as the subject matter settles into the room, into the viewer’s passage through the space of the exhibit.
Zhou’s method of curatorship, therefore, does not operate through spectacle, but rather through calibration – the calibration of distance, of pace, of material presence. At a time when many exhibitions seek to announce their relevancy and importance, Zhou presents something much rarer: a pause; a stop; a reminder that meaning often emerges not at the moment of making a choice, but in the instants leading up to and immediately following the moment of choice when the moment of choice and the moment of inevitable fate occupy the same space.
