Fluid Architectures – Poetics of the Self
Private View: Thursday 18th June, 6pm - 9pm with Lihong Bai’s performance 7pm - 7:30pm
Viewing Dates: 18th - 21st June | 10:30am - 5pm
Performance with Lujane Pagganwala | Sunday 21st June 2026 at 11 am.
Roundtable Artist Discussion with Coffee & Pastries | Sunday 21st June 2026 at 11:30 am.
Where do the poetics of the Self reside, sheltered in ways of being that house us?
‘Spaces await discovery, as do identities, in relation to their contexts,’ (Pagganwala).
New performative site-specific installations and performances, by Lihong Bai, Lujane Pagganwala and Vincenzo Muratore, confer this query, in subtly participatory phenomenological spaces, across three galleries. They convey how identity is fluid, everchanging over time and place, as personal and cultural facets shift, intermingle, perpetually Self-reconstructing through experience.
In Outsider, 2026, Lihong Bai's site-specific installation, performance and performance films enact transmigratory journeys, through inner Mongolia’s Kubuqi desert, China to London. Her journey echoes the cyclical migratory travel and human sheep kinship of her shepherding childhood homeland. Rather than a utopian return, home becomes precariously unattainable, a Foucauldian heterotopia, displaced through accelerated urban-rural change and global travels. Like the goat, Bai no longer belongs to grasslands, signified sensorially by hay, performatively embodied. She is transformed, migrating to new ecological environments, in a diasporic transience of comingling identity. Swept in contemporaneity’s fluidity, the present fleets, mutating into past memory.
Outsider, 2026, Courtesy of the artist, Lihong Bai
Lujane Pagganwala’sThe Pagemaster’s Ballad, 2026, disperses transience. She plays with scale and architectures, creating a sensorial space - sound, smell, touch, taste and sight - where children’s tents hover, hung from the ceiling, punctuated by poetic texts, on the floor. She enlivens what she terms ‘flash spaces,’ spaces that haunt, unleashing buried associations, experiential slippages and memories. Pagganwala atmospherically reenvisions Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, through a global lens. Sugar, tents, and rose water conjure the post-colonial past into the present. Let this spatial-textual sensory space enchant you, flashing associations seen, imagined or dreamed. ‘Spaces await discovery, as do identities, in relation to their contexts,’ (Pagganwala).
Vincenzo Muratore innovates in his White Womb Series, 2026. Paper-thin tablet-like marble fragments form one room diorama sculptures. When struck with light, illuminated interiors reveal, yet partially conceal, cyanotype texts and images. The White Womb sculptures embody Jungian psychological spaces, self-reflective spaces cited by Bachelard; wherein, a European house's stories/floors are analogous to the psyche's strata. The cyanotype texts and images become visible through the tethered fragment walls’ crevices and small windows. Become captivated in search and discovery - your own discovery, in communion with the artist's poetic self-discovery. Where is the Self, collective unconscious or soul housed, sheltered within us?
Bai, Muratore and Paggawala create physical narratives. Dialogues between the components within their installation meld into an overall affect. Imagination takes flight. Muratore and Pagganwala’s installation’s tactile textual spaces are invocations, shifting palimpsests. Ignited by the artist’s elusive narrative, one spawns one’s own reflective narratives, in communal story generation. Pagganwala and Bai invite visitors to performatively imbibe their homeland’s signifiers – hay, sugar, rosewater - while exploring socio-cultural political structures and their architectural expression, interrogating spatial allocation.
Fluid Architectures – Poetics of the Self explores the aesthetic nature of curatorial spaces, as a conveyance of artistic, philosophical and psychological propositions, related to space, the phenomenological and the reception of the Self. Where do visitors reside, housed within the curatorial space’s propositions, ways of being and affect? Experience the artworks’ evocations, to explore the Poetics of the Self, in shifting thematic variations.
Beverley Harrison
Curator and Founder, Fascicle Contemporary
Find out more about the artists here
Lihong Bai | Instagram & Website
Vincenzo Muratore | Instagram & Website
Lujane Pagganwala | Instagram