The Industrial Age enabled humans to expand so quickly, and one consequence is the climate catastrophe we’re living in today.  While we may now be in the Information Age, it’s this industrial machinery that enables the modern comforts of living, yet it’s largely hidden from view. How many of us see how cars, clothes, and furniture are made? Ayodeji Kingsley brings this industrial machinery back into the foreground by transforming discarded machinery, tools, and industrial detritus into sculpture.

He uses these discarded parts to sculpt creatures from the natural world, in a knowing nod to the irony that the very machinery used to create the artwork has separated us from it. We have reached a point where many urban dwellers aren’t able to recognise some of the most common animals you may find a few miles outside of the city. 

The peak of this irony may be seen in ‘Hoof Hearted’, a metal sculpture of a horse’s head. Until the dawn of the machine age, it was horses that did much of humanity’s heavy labour. Once supplanted, their numbers declined significantly, and they were retained only for leisure activities. In recreating a horse from metal, it recognises one of the most significant transitions in human history. 

Kingsley’s heritage is Nigerian, which provides vital context for his work. A lot of the industrial and technological waste from the Western world ends up in Africa, and so creating works from industrial leftovers is a commentary on the unseen problems that old machinery creates and the recognition that we need to approach the globalised world through a more sustainable lens.

Art itself has had to face several questions about its sustainability, given its use of oil-based products and the carbon footprint of shipping. It’s through the use of discarded materials that I’m seeing a lot of the innovation in art. While the use of found materials goes back to Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal, the need to utilise them for sustainability feels like it’s only just getting started. The use of scrap metal in art is likely to increase as sustainability takes on a stronger role, and these works suggest that Kingsley is a forerunner of this movement. 

This merging of the delicately sculpted and the readymade is evident in a work in which two rats scramble over a fire extinguisher. It’s a playful work but also reminds us that our detritus is also affecting the natural world, where animals work our rubbish into their lives, often to devastating effects, think of animals caught up in plastic causing them to suffocate. 

Ayodeji Kingsley’s sculptures can be taken at face value as technically crafted artworks, the product of hours of skill and labour. However, there’s also deeper messaging within them about the Anthropocene age we’re living in, our disconnection from nature, sustainability, and our responsibility as the species that has damaged the earth and is also the one species that can save it. 

More information on Ayodeji Kingsley’s work may be found on his website and Instagram.

When we see an artwork, we are seeing the final output of a creative journey. While it can be inspiring in itself, sometimes the value lies in witnessing how the work was created. Oluwaseun Ademefun applies this to her creative practice, opening it up so that others can see her creating art, and this extends to her participatory workshops.

Art has therapeutic benefits in viewing and creating it, and it’s this community value that the artist applies to her work. Community is vital in her native Nigeria, but here in the UK, it can often feel fractured, with many viewing our current generations as living through a loneliness epidemic. Her work embodies the idea of community and how it can create bridges across divides.

In her work ‘Generational Identities’,  we see how persons from different generations are wrenched apart as the canvas curves away from the frame, leaving a gap between them. Yet it’s not a gap so large that it can’t be overcome. It’s recognising a communication problem, but it strikes me as hopeful work. 

In her painting of Gbemisola, we see a young girl struggling to fit into British society while remembering her Nigerian roots. It’s a struggle that many immigrant children face as they want to assimilate with their new friends, adopting a Western name and values, while often putting their home country behind them. Yet it’s an identity that many of those same individuals return to as they age, proving that it’s what makes us different and stand out that is our strength. It’s an experience any first-generation migrant can identify with, and many second-generationers like myself also find personal.

We see a similar story of dual identities play out in the painting ‘Morrocan’. On one side is his Moroccan hometown, and Le Louvre on the other, as he has travelled to Paris for financial opportunities. It’s that delicate balance of remembering one culture, while assimilating another, and many of us feel like we can never fully fit into either, becoming what are referred to as ‘third culture kids’. 

Ademefun can also apply this vision to murals, as we see in one she designed in Southwark, now on display in Clichy, France. Some of her works incorporate discarded items, with a nude woman’s breast made of wine corks and a smoking man collaged from non-biodegradable materials. It’s a recognition that we are over-polluting the planet. If artists are going to provide a better vision for the planet’s future, they must also incorporate sustainability into their practice. Using other materials can add unique textures to artworks, beyond what paint alone can achieve. It also draws people in to interact with the works and study the intricate details and materials of each. 

While recognising contemporary issues, including the climate catastrophe and the growing number of people living alone on a more populous earth, these aren’t works that espouse doom and gloom. They are a symbol of hope. Yes, we find ourselves in dark times. Still, it’s through community and collective engagement that we can create a better future for humanity, and Oluwaseun Ademefun’s work will continue to champion her wish for togetherness.

You can find out more about Oluwaseun Ademefun’s art on her website.

Light next to dark on a canvas may seem like opposites, but one cannot exist without the other. If there are no lighter colours to compare it to, how can the richness of the darker elements be evocative? It’s this dual harmony and tension that lies at the centre of the work of Azerbaijani artist Zibeyda Seyidova. 

Works such as ‘Threshold of Night’ bring to mind those of the Abstract Expressionists and Colour Field paintings, particularly Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals at Tate Modern. Both his works and those of Seyidova’s draw you in with the depths of their darkness, and the longer you stare into the darkness, the more they peer into your soul. Are they doorways to somewhere spiritual or something altogether darker?

Limiting her work to the lens of Western art history only highlights half the story. Her works draw upon Islamic philosophy, particularly the dialogue between ẓāhir (the manifest) and bāṭin (the hidden). Heavily layering her works gives them a sense of texture. Still, her process also involves scraping back layers to reveal what’s beneath, prompting questions about what she has revealed to us through her paintings and whether more elements will reveal themselves the longer we gaze at them. 

Islamic art has a long history of excluding figures, a practice known as aniconism. Through Seyidova’s abstract works, she is channelling human emotions through abstraction in a process known as dhikr, or remembrance.

Her abstract works do feature representational elements, as we see in her work ‘Point of Equilibrium’, where the dark triangle slashing across a pale canvas suggests something in the foreground is casting a shadow. It’s a recognition that there are architectural elements in abstract art, and she uses this to significant effect when she displayed her work in a hospital with the pale colours and clean lines mirroring those of the institution where they were housed. 

The interplay of light and shade continues in her representational works, including ‘Veil’, in which a cloth is lit by sunlight streaming through a window. The haziness of the light suggests a moment captured in a dream, while the thick impasto texture suggests we can reach into the painting and grab the cloth.

We see this again in her work ‘Transmission’, exploring the textures of a rug that makes you want to run your fingers along it. ‘Carried by Duration’ is the one piece where a human figure does appear, but it’s subtle, as it may not be noticed on first glance. Yet in the work, it feels less about the figure and more about how the light interacts with the textures of her hair and skin.

Spirituality is an essential part of Seyidova’s work, and these pieces, with their use of light, evoke the religious paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Whether viewing her abstract or more representational works, we’re asked to look deep into them, to discover what sits between the manifest and the hidden. Combining Islamic philosophy and Western art history gives her a unique voice within the world of abstract contemporary art.

Entering the space of Kairós: Between Choice and Fate at Batsford Gallery has a very charged yet subtle quality. The gallery’s atmosphere seems more akin to a threshold than an empty box for exhibiting artworks. This feeling of being suspended is deliberate, and it makes perfect sense. The exhibition is based upon Kairós, the Ancient Greek term that refers to that critical juncture where chance, choice, and destiny are aligned. At first glance, the show sets itself up in that fragile space of uncertainty and choice as being experientially lived, as opposed to merely stated.

Kairós: Between Choice and Fate was organized by PA Art; PA Art is a long-standing supporter of contemporary visual art, curator experimentation, and the growth and development of artists. As such, PA Art functions within the changing landscape of London’s art community as a connective tissue between artists, ideas, and larger cultural conversations. That attitude is very apparent in this exhibition. The exhibition does not express one unified idea. Rather, it provides a platform for multiple voices to converge, intersect and sometimes contradict each other.

Hui Qi and Huan Zhou curated Kairós: Between Choice and Fate and have resisted the urge to represent freedom and fate as mutually exclusive. Instead, the exhibition treats freedom as an interdependent entity; as something that is often compromised and influenced by factors including our psychological habits, social structures, technology, and inherited stories. Therefore, the exhibition serves as a meditation on how choices emerge under constraints, and how the decisions we make are rarely as autonomous as we would prefer them to be.

Anatomy of a Belief by Yu Yu (Spencer) is perhaps the most psychologically engaging work in the exhibition. The work is exhibited as a diptych composed of mixed media and relates to the phenomenon of confirmation bias. An abstract behavioral concept is rendered in a tactile and unsettling way. The left side of the panel is compact and restricted. Red yarn is threaded throughout fractured material and creates a visual enclosure which illustrates how information-based environments can confine thought and identity alike. The sense of confinement experienced here is similar to the experience of being surrounded by an algorithmically-supported belief system.

The right panel does not provide release, instead it creates disruption. The figure is broken apart and remade, with an additional eye symbolizing awareness rather than escape. Spencer portrays self-awareness as a laborious and disorientating process. To see is not to be free immediately, but to face the discomfort of realizing your cognitive boundaries. Within the exhibition’s overarching structure, the work represents the relationship between agency and inevitability. We perceive our beliefs as being selected by us, however they are frequently unconsciously constructed well prior to our recognition of them.

While Spencer examines the structural influences of belief, Manlin Zhang examines the origin of thought. Intelligence in Motion-Dreaming Butterfly is an oil-on-claybord painting that depicts intelligence before it develops into language or logical constructs. The surface is alive, and holds the forms of both intuition and computation in a state of ambiguity. Everything is fluid. Thought appears to be recursive, incomplete, and inconclusive.

A fragile equilibrium exists in the work, and there is an indication that meaning is forming, but that it has not made a decision as to what form that meaning will take. In the context of Kairós, this is a pivotal moment. It is the point of transition before a decision is articulated, and before an action evolves into a consequence. Zhang’s painting reminds us that freedom may be most active in those pre-symbolic realms where intelligence remains in flux and results remain undefined.

Bob Holmes’ use of a more obvious symbolism is evident in Broken Continuum. Two female bodies are merged into a single fragmented body, eliminating the distinction between the self and others, memories and perceptions. Blindness and awareness are present in an uneasy balance, indicating that insight is never total, and that vision is always incomplete. Animals and botanical motifs appear throughout the composition, referencing ancestral memories, folkloric traditions, and myths.

Holmes appropriates the visual elements of Classical Portraits; however, he disrupts them through their fragmentation, layering and disjointedness. As such, the portrait appears to be both solidified and at the same time disconcertingly unrecognizable. Justice, inner sight, and internal blindness to the divine emerge, but they do so without finality. In this way, the work occupies a state of ambiguity as opposed to one of moral clarity; thus, it is consistent with the exhibition’s reluctance to represent choice as being either positive or heroic. Ultimately, the work demonstrates that choice is intertwined with what we inherit, what we forget and what we fail to see.

The opposition between apparent control and structural constraint is made visually explicit in Direction Illusion by Henryk Terpilowski. Compressed seed pods are a powerful symbol of growth and possibility which are embedded in a steel lattice grid. On top of the seed pods lies a found steering wheel; while the steering wheel is a ubiquitous symbol of human agency and direction, it is stationary. Therefore, it has no ability to turn.

The visual impression is immediate and subtle yet disturbing. Within a single object exist natural capacity, human intent and structural constraint. The work posits that our gestures of control are merely ritualized motions that occur within systems that determine the parameters of all possible outcomes. While the steering wheel implies choice, it provides none. It serves as a stark illustration of how quickly symbols of agency can camouflage structural limitations on freedom.

The presence of multiple artists (Alice Boot, Anastasia Neff, Eskild Beck, Gera Dunachie, Luke Bacon, Marian Obando, Rachel Barlow, Xiaohan Sun, Xiaoxiao Chen, Xiwen Xu, Yao Feiyun, Yilun Liu and Jiawen Zin Zhang) adds additional dimensions to the exhibition as opposed to each artist vying for attention. Their contributions collectively create a multilayered context of viewpoints. The overall atmosphere of the exhibition is conversational as opposed to didactic with each artist adding a unique nuance to the central inquiry of how choice functions in today’s society.

A live performance by Jay Mistry contributes to the temporal element of the exhibition. Performances take place solely in the present. They cannot be completely captured or replicated. The addition of performance reinforces the notion that certain types of agency are ephemeral, embodied and irreversible.

Ultimately, it is the exhibition’s willingness to leave questions unanswered and to avoid defining freedom and providing ways to regain lost freedom that distinguish Kairós: Between Choice and Fate. The exhibition creates a space in which ambiguity regarding freedom is both accepted and celebrated. Through the careful curation of Hui Qi and Huan Zhou, the exhibition develops into a space of reflection rather than conclusion.

Given the current cultural obsession with optimization, clarity and control, the refusal to provide answers or solutions to the dilemma of freedom seems relatively radical. The exhibition suggests that perhaps true freedom will not come about when individuals master systems, but rather when they recognize the points of intersection between decision and destiny. When choice does not cancel out fate, but instead comes close to it, there occurs a temporary shift.

Artists include Alice Boot, Anastasia Neff, Bob Holmes, Eskild Beck, Gera Dunachie, Henryk Terpilowski, Jiawen Zin Zhang, Luke Bacon, Manlin Zhang, Marian Obando, Rachel Barlow, Xiaohan Sun, Xiaoxiao Chen, Xiwen Xu, Yao Feiyun, Yilun Liu, and Yu Yu (Spencer).

The special performance is by Jay Mistry.

The exhibition is curated by Hui Qi and Huan Zhou.

Photography is by Jiaqing Chen.

Exhibition support is provided by Chün-Tse Chang and JiaJun Huang.