14 - 30th August 2026
Purist Gallery, 96 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3EA
Artists: Gabriel Cautain, Charlie Henzi, Xingxin Hu, Hyunju Oh, Lucas Taberna
Exhibition Text Installation views
This is the territory the exhibition sets out. The five practices explores recollection as a partial and involuntary event. In 1980, Roland Barthes looks at memory in the perspective of how photographs holds our attention: the studium, its cultural and informational content, and the punctum, an accidental detail that pricks the viewer without explanation. The punctum cannot be searched for; it finds you, the way a smell or a texture can return a whole month’s memory uninvited.
A lake of objects emerges from memory, whilst a smooth frost shrouds the impression of a shop you’ve always been. You remember how you looked at them, but red lights began to sting your sight out of focus, so that only those buttons remain clear to you.
None of this is a failure of resolution. It is closer to what memory does. In the exhibition, sharpness is withheld on purpose, holding artworks more like an address; ‘letters’ sent to someone who might not be present to receive them. Semi-public, and a partial proof of who inhabits there. In a similar vein, Barthes argued that all a photograph can prove is that its subject was once truly there, 46 years later, it is increasingly common to encounter imperceptible generations of fictitious ‘photographs’. Yet what remains unchanged is the way a stimuli can hook a memory, pulling back the long submerged to the surface.
Charlie Henzi (b. 2001) lives and works in London. Working primarily with found and appropriated imagery, printed fabric, collage, acrylic paint and embellishment, Henzi examines representations of women in popular culture through the politics of the gaze, performance, consumption and desire.
Xingxin Hu (b. 1988) lives and works between London and Beijing. Working predominantly in oil painting, Hu draws from personal and second-hand archives, everyday objects, fragments of bodies and fleeting encounters to explore femininity, memory, desire and the tension between self-perception and social expectation.
Hyunju Oh (b. 1999) lives and works in London. Working across painting, sculpture and installation, Oh examines how bodies become visible, classified or obscured within urban systems shaped by architecture, data, logistics and surveillance.
Lucas Taberna (b. 2003) lives and works in London. Working across installation, sculpture and film, Taberna explores the unstable boundary between familiarity and the uncanny, often using domestic environments to examine loneliness, intimacy, surveillance and the psychological spaces we inhabit.
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