Artists

Aziza Kadyri, Li Li Ren, Narges Mohammadi, Luana Vitra, Anna Gonzalez Noguchi, Rafal Zajko

Press release

Copperfield is pleased to host a joint exhibition project in London with Coulisse Gallery, Stockholm eastcontemporary, Milan Magician Space, Beijing Vacancy, Shanghai Curated by Copperfield, London Discussions around memory, history and what is remembered center around written or recorded history and oral histories and traditions. But what about the gestures, skills, mannerisms and dances that have been passed generation to generation without recording or uttering a word. Like muscle memory, we pick up all sorts of information from observing others from childhood, particularly our elders. This exhibition explores what is translated and passed on through action, generation to generation. Anna Gonzalez Noguchi could not communicate with her grandfather in Japanese before he passed away, but through observing him when she was a child as he tended his orchids, and by inheriting his tools and his plants, she has found herself following in his movements, taking the same care and carrying on his tradition. Incorporating her grandfather's archive images of orchids, her work draws our attention to the fact that to learn from someone's actions does not always mean to be taught. Her works are often intimate and even hand sized, like ceremonial tools or talismans carrying her past into the future. The root of Rafal Zajko's ceramic relief begins with a sewing machine inherited from his grandmother, coupled with the memories of his grandparents' labour in communist era factories and then at home, maintaining their skills after the fall of the USSR. Opening the machine now as an adult became an act of dissection for Zajko: its internal mechanisms treated as anatomical structures and translated here into ceramic relief. Repeated around a circular form, the components evoke both mechanical systems and biological bodies. We learn non verbally through repetition – first witnessed and then practiced. The repetition of the machine's movements in 16 ceramic copies becomes a repetition of labour, gesture and inheritance. Through the transformation of an industrial mechanism into a handmade ceramic object, the work considers what remains of labour and memory when the people, industries and systems that produced them begin to disappear. Living in the forest, Li Li Ren's grandmother was an unusual soul. Ren's visits have an almost magical quality when she talks of her – of skinning snakes, of hunting with a respect for nature, of living alongside other creatures. Observing her grandmother brought her a great many subtle skills and sensitivities from a young age, though some she has only recognised in adult life. At its core is an attention to breath – the act of breathing, of its ability to calm, to heal. But also an attention to the breath of others, of other creatures, of what their breath says about them – calm, frightened, tense. As she says herself, the work is less about the bones or the arrow themselves but about drawing attention to "the quiet space where life happens". While many of these examples have a happy context, Narges Mohammadi's childhood experience of war and poverty in Afghanistan has nonetheless translated observed movements to incidental knowledge and skills. In her video work we see her recreate the deadening process of attempting to sift flour from the sand it was bulked out with by profiteers due to scarcity – despite it being impossible to digest. In counter position to the film sits a lamp carved from alabaster, shining against its sand backdrop. This recalls a memory of neighbours joining the family to share in the warmth of a special trick. The act of placing a lamp under a table when partly covered by a blanket will provide a little warmth to all those whose limbs are under it, while still providing some light too. Recalling these processes in sculpture and video is to underscore the painful intricacies and depths of poverty – a situation so dire that even ownership of a lamp may be relative wealth in the eyes of a neighbour. Aziza Kadyri's patchwork tapestry memorialises not only the memory of observing the needlework of women in her family that sparked a career rooted in textile but also the possibility that new technologies may replace those skills and movements in more ways than one. The textile itself is composed partly of hand work, partly of machine work and partly with historic Uzbek fabric. Despite the presence of both handcraft and machine work, the most direct real threat to the stitching hand comes in the form of digital design, mechanised outcome possibilities that now increasingly reach the general market. Still the desire of makers to embellish may keep the movements of the hand used and recalled in embroidering even part of their work. The second subtler threat is echoed in the double self-portrait, where while one figure stitches, the other scrolls mindlessly. Since gestures and actions are only retained and passed down through repetition and observation will these new addictive actions break down the memory of the past ones. How many skilful movements can a mind and hand recall – and for how long? Closing the exhibition is Luana Vitra, whose sculptures function like chemical equations, exploring and balancing some of the core elements that make up not just our planet but also our own bodies. It was Vitra who first made me really appreciate that elements like the iron and copper in our veins are a universal constant to all humans and many more creatures on this planet – but also to the universe itself. Regardless of size, gender, race, sexuality and the plethora of other things we obsess and divide over, these elements are present in all of us, mocking these distinctions, mocking the land we fight over as it too is made up of these minerals. The curious reality is that the ruddy metal, colouring the stones in Vitra's work could have already passed through a body or bodies, and may still take its place in a new life to come. What these works propose is a more chemical kind of memory, encoding or transference of information – a mineral memory that is beyond words. This is at once a more spiritual way of looking at generational connections and perhaps also the tip of a science, as concepts such as genetic generational trauma begin to be researched. Opening Wednesday 7 October 6 - 8:30pm Runs till 21 November 2026