Exhibition notes:
All over the place. There are at least two kinds of ‘all over the place’. There is the idiom meaning confused, or disorganised and there is ‘all over the place’ as in everywhere. Between these meanings you might find this exhibition… or above, or below, after all it is all over the place.
Recursive Islands. A recursive island is an island that lies within another island. Piccalilli’s invitation to Harun to make an exhibition, led to Harun inviting Alicja, Brian and Olivia as well as Library Mothership, Tint Library and WANAWAL These library projects in particular by their nature are composite, assemblages of other voices, in print, in audio and ephemera. The roles of host and guest continuously loop and enlarge.
Polyvocality in print. Library Mothership, Tint Library and WANAWAL (West Asian and North African Women’s Art Library). Library Mothership is a nomad library project by Athena Mothership, who self-describes as a humanoid spaceship, exploring topography and stack-ups of images. As an observer vessel and extension to Athena’s practice, Library Mothership systematically researches, collects, and archives books, fashion, digital and printed ephemera. Tint Library is a London-based, Black owned, independent library that provides art-based materials available to borrow for free. Tint operates like a traditional library in the sense that each reader owns a library card which gives them access to all of Tint’s collection on a
loaning basis. Tint is the most recent project of Mariam Adesokan, a multidisciplinary designer and researcher. WANAWAL is a living archive and library that exists both digitally and physically. WANAWAL reimagines the politics of preservation by questioning the colonial legacies that shape collective memory. WANAWAL was initiated by Êvar Huseynî, a Kurdish artist and archivist whose experimental work moves between text, film and photography.
What is prompting the librarial turn?
Dissensus. In Felix Guattari’s 1989 text The Three Ecologies he argues for the potential of dissensus as a strategy to resist an uncritical consensus as the basis of an integrated, flattening multiculturalism. In this context the libraries (and the artists who have initiated them) operate as distinct collections with different focal points that find their own points of relation to each other in organic, unplanned, ad hoc ways.
Ghost Kitchen. Diagonally opposite Piccalilli, which was formerly in the basement of a wine bar in Sydenham is a ghost kitchen. Delivery riders casually gather outside at all hours. Also known as a virtual restaurant, cloud kitchen or dark kitchen, a ghost kitchen is a food service business that serves customers exclusively by delivery and pick-up based on phone and online ordering. This proximity to the ghost kitchen informs the screening of Terms and Conditions (2024), a two-channel video by Alicja Rogalska that sees couriers dismantling the thermal food bags that are part of their workwear while discussing the systematic exploitation they are subjected to.
Transcribed voice note from Brian De Jesus, re: Untitled (13th Shift). “I like the idea of having the painting hidden. I always struggle a lot with this idea of being a delivery rider. You have to cover up your whole face, your identity. . . And also you are kind of rejected by society somehow. But on the other hand being an artist, people want to know more about you, what you do, who you are – and all of that. And that clash is exciting… While I’m working as a delivery rider nobody really knows who I am or what I do… that idea of having the painting is also important in a way… what you think?”
“THE STRUGGLE IS A FIELD OF DREAMS”. How do you weigh a sigh? (2025) by Olivia Abächerli features scores of informal notes and drawings. Olivia externalises a series of inner conflicts, contradictions and emotional tensions arising from her own questioning of how to live amid political and climate crises. The work thematises her feelings of being overwhelmed and the desire to grasp the complexity of personal, scientific and political entanglements.