The exhibition A Theatre of Cruelty was initiated by Yurui Shi and successfully opened on 9 August 2025 at SAFEHOUSE 1 in London. The curatorial work was led by Jiabin Xu, with Yi Lai and Ziqi Li jointly contributing to the preparation. This remarkable exhibition officially closed on 13 August 2025. Bringing together 28 artists from China, Germany, and Chile, the exhibition explored new spatial narratives beyond the confines of the white cube, through installations, moving images, photography, painting, and experimental media practices.
A Theatre of Cruelty offers a subtle contemporary interpretation of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. By transforming a Victorian townhouse into a unified sensory field, the exhibition constructs a coherently immersive environment: peeled wallpaper becomes an actor who narrates time, humidity and light changes orchestrate the audience’s physical and psychological responses. The exhibition powerfully demonstrates the potential of curating itself to perform as a creative medium that generates unified emotional and cognitive experiences. Yet this huge curatorial success provokes a dialogue about how individual artworks position themselves within such a field of totality—which constructs its most inspirational theoretical contribution.
The handling of spatial narrative power is particularly sophisticated. Yihan Pan’s Untitled (2025)—a fictive window made of a white frame and a printed landscape—was embedded into the timber beams of the house. This simulacra window enters into a tense dialogue with its opposite, a real window and the scenery beyond. Through precise staging, the conceptual installation transcends mere visual metaphor, until interfering and activating the construction’s historical fabric. Incidental but ingenious, the installation discloses the polysemy of the ‘window’—a conduit of vision, and at the same time a parallax of illusion, when concept meets reality, the ideology of ‘window’ meets the entity of window, the contemporary art encounters historical building. It thus forms a symbiotic relationship between the artwork and its field, becoming a key curatorial narrative node. As Miwon Kwon raised the discussion in One Place After Another (2002), site-specificity has expanded beyond physical adaptation to encompass discursive and contextual dimensions—an idea embodied in the setting of the artwork Untitled.
This curatorial–artistic symbiosis finds another expression in Lei Zhao’s The Crowd (2025), which is projected in a cramped stairwell, compelling viewers to crouch and peer inwards. The film, focusing on the private lives of public figures, reflects the collective pathological voyeuristic impulse characteristic described by Gustave Le Bon in his work The Crowd： A Study of the Popular Mind (1985) during the internet era. Here, curatorial intervention is incisive: the enforced crouched posture and auditory interference from adjacent rooms reframe the contextual reception of the work. Far from diminishing it, the strategy adds a brand new reflexive critique of voyeurism itself. Themes of voyeurism are concretised and externalised through discomfort and surveillance introduced by the curatorial practice, prompting wider reflection on privacy, exposure, and the ethics of spectatorship.
The curatorial narrative thus generates a palpable and productive tension. This deliberate structuring of the environment constitutes a bold authorial strategy. Such approaches may challenge conventional habits of art appreciation, but sharpen the exhibition’s conceptual rigour and coherence, extending Artaud’s principle of ‘cruelty’ into each curatorial decision.
The significance of A Theatre of Cruelty lies not only in its highly immersive environment but also in its demonstration of the evolution of site-specificity in curatorial practice—from a paradigm of physical adaptation to one of conceptual symbiosis. Here, curators and artists collaborate rather than confront, jointly exploring the potential of art to generate new experiences beyond the white cube. The exhibition poses an extremely generative question: when artworks are woven into a greater narrative structure, is their autonomy diminished or redefined? Instead of offering a simple answer, A Theatre of Cruelty invites audiences to dwell on its complexity. Its achievement lies in showing that curating, as a rigorous intellectual practice, can co-construct with artistic creation a discursive field that is richer, more open, and more dialectical.
Featured Artists:
Thomas Behling, Chuanduan Chen, Xiaoran Fan, Longfei Jiang, Caijing Kuang, Mengzhu Li, José Cárdenas Lorca, Yihan Pan, Lei Pu & Bibi Afshar-Shirazi, Xingyi Qu, Ruonan Shen, Guangyi Shen, Zhong Sun, Zhuofan Tao, Hao Wang, Alexis Wong, Xuya Wu, Jiyun Xia & Jing Xu, Tree Xu, Wei Yang, Odile Yu, Xiaoping Yu, Iris Jingyi Zeng, Hui Zhang, Lei Zhao, Mingzhuo Zheng, Minyu Zhu, Weihang Zhu
Producer:
Yurui Shi
Curator:
Jiabin Xu
Executive Curator:
Yi Lai
Visual Director:
Ziqi Li
Special Thanks:
Lulu, Yang Wu, Jackie Liu, Yaojia Dong, L.S, Monica, Tanya
