Preview: Thursday 6 November 2025
6-8pm
An Alchemy of Elsewhere gathers works that move through unstable territories; of translation, ritual, and transformation. Here, the colonial residue becomes a raw material: a matter to be transmuted, re-enchanted, unsettled. Alchemy is not the promise of purity, but the practice of mixture and a slow combustion where histories, bodies, and beliefs blur into new forms.
In this space, the magical and the theoretical share a single breath. Spells are recast as speculative epistemologies, gestures of resistance against the rationalities that once sought to contain them. The exhibition lingers in what Homi Bhabha names the in-between, the space where mimicry becomes invention, and the fragments of the past mutate into futures not yet named.
If alchemy begins with the desire to change what seems unchangeable, then each of the artists gathered here brings their own kind of laboratory: a place where inherited forms — of identity, material, and myth — are melted down and recast. Their works offer not closure, but transformation: ways of thinking and feeling through the instability of the hybrid, the translated, the partially known.
Mark Corfield-Moore approaches weaving as both archive and incantation. His textiles stretch across time, carrying with them the ghosts of trade, displacement, and cultural exchange. The loom, a technology as ancient as empire, becomes a portal for rethinking how threads of belonging are spun and re-spun. In Corfield-Moore’s hands, the act of weaving is a choreography of translation: digital glitches and traditional motifs flicker between centuries, crossing from the tactile to the virtual and back again. His tapestries are woven time machines, their warp and weft charged with memory and migration. What appears decorative reveals itself as temporal: a woven language through which the migrations of people, patterns, and stories are transformed. Each crossing of thread becomes a quiet act of resistance, an assertion that history is never fixed but constantly being remade through touch.
If Corfield-Moore’s textiles work through rhythm and repetition, Baseera Khan engages the surface itself as a site of devotion and disguise. Their practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, and now a return to painting, the medium with which they first began. In these recent works, shown alongside two small sculptures, Khan approaches painting as a form of manuscript: each wooden panel a palimpsest where language, memory, and ornament coalesce. She begins by laying down fragments of text from her family archive, letters, documents, traces of lived histories, which are then sealed beneath layers of paint. Over this hidden writing, she carves delicate, recursive patterns into the surface, producing a topography of marks that oscillate between script and ornament, revelation and concealment.
These incised gestures evoke the devotional precision of manuscript illumination, yet they also recall the coded languages of protection, the ways in which communities inscribe themselves into visibility while veiling their most intimate truths. In Khan’s hands, ornamentation becomes a strategy of survival, a luminous disguise that both hides and holds meaning. What seems decorative is, in fact, an encrypted act of remembrance. The surface becomes a threshold where the sacred and the secret meet: an alchemy of concealment that transforms narrative into texture and vulnerability into resilience. Alongside her sculptural works, which explore the architectures of faith, commerce, and surveillance, these paintings extend Khan’s ongoing inquiry into how power and tenderness can coexist within a single gesture. Theirs is a practice of care through opacity, a refusal of legibility that becomes its own radical form of clarity.
Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Sanctum (2025) unfolds as a luminous short film, a self-contained two-and-a-half-minute work that is based on Williams Gamaker’s earlier work The Bang Straws (2021), the first part of her acclaimed Critical Affection trilogy. The Bang Straws reimagines the casting process of The Good Earth (1937), a Hollywood production infamous for its racist “yellow face” portrayal of Chinese characters. In Williams Gamaker’s reworking, the film’s historical wound is reopened not to re-enact it, but to heal it through performance. She re-casts the role of O-Lan, originally played by white German-American actress Luise Rainer, with Chinese actor Dahong Wang, a long-term collaborator, and reconstructs The Good Earth’s original analogue special effects, from hyper close-ups of locusts to a swarm conjured from tea leaves. In this new excerpt, Sanctum, Williams Gamaker isolates and distills the emotional and political pulse of The Bang Straws into a concentrated cinematic meditation. The sanctum is both literal and symbolic: a space of refuge, of ritual repair, and of spectral reappearance. Through lush colour, layered sound, and choreographed gesture, the film performs an act of reclamation - returning the gaze, rebalancing power. The work exemplifies the artist’s ongoing project of what she terms “fictional activism”: a re-enchantment of cinema as a tool for justice. By remaking a racist fiction as a site of care, Williams Gamaker transforms imitation into invention, the colonial gaze into an alchemy of empathy.
Together, these three artists refuse the tidy categories through which art and identity are often parsed. They work instead in the liminal, in the shimmer between form and formlessness, visibility and disappearance. Their gestures are experiments in transformation: matter becoming meaning, meaning dissolving into sensation. Theirs is an elsewhere that cannot be mapped but only felt, a landscape of correspondences and crossings, of fragments made luminous through friction.
To dwell in this elsewhere is to accept instability as method. It is to recognise that history itself is mutable, that its materials can be melted down and reconfigured. In the hands of Corfield-Moore, Khan, and Williams Gamaker, alchemy becomes a way of thinking otherwise: an aesthetics of the threshold, a politics of the porous. Each work, in its own register, speaks of metamorphosis, the slow burning through which the inherited becomes the invented.
An Alchemy of Elsewhere invites its visitors not simply to look, but to listen, to the murmur of translation, to the rustle of metamorphosis. Within its orbit, the colonial past is neither erased nor resolved; it is metabolised into something still forming, still radiant with potential. These works do not offer closure. They shimmer instead with the unfinished, with the uncertain promise of becoming something else.
Here, transformation is not a metaphor but a practice. The hybrid, the haunted, the half-known, all are ingredients in a slow, luminous experiment. In this crucible of art, theory, and spellwork, we are reminded that elsewhere is not a place apart, but a process: the continual re-enchantment of what has been broken, the careful transmutation of what remains.
For further information please contact:
Georgia Griffiths
georgia@niruratnam.com