Betwixt: Soma Bognar - Ziqi Chen - Benito Ekmekdjian Xinyu Han - Ilyas Kassam - Robert Mead
General Assembly is pleased to present Betwixt, a six artist group exhibition that examines interstitial space through painting. The show brings together six works that inhabit the thresholds and edges, and invite us to dwell in the overlooked or transitional zones that shape our experience of the world. In internal and external spaces that comprise our lives, interstitial spaces are the in-between - the airport gate, the margin between our private and public selves, the blurred territory between dream and waking, and even our perception of time itself. These moments and places are often fleeting or forgotten and resist easy representation. The artists in Betwixt draw us into these liminal zones with varied approaches that contemplate these periods of transition.
Benito Ekmekdjian’s Gate 24 is a monumental self portrait of the artist waiting at the airport gate to travel from his old home in Buenos Aires to his new one in the UK. We find him in a holding pattern and unsure of what the future may bring and charged with anticipation and melancholy. The artist depicts himself in a physical transition as well as an emotional one.
Motion takes center stage in Xinyu Chen’s riotous painting Mind Game, which depicts two figures on the dance floor. Their bodies blur and merge into pure kinetic energy and create a vivid depiction of the space between form and formlessness and highlights the limits of our awareness to perceive such moments.
Taken together, the works in Betwixt reveal that interstitial spaces are not empty vacuums. Indeed, they are fertile zones of tension and possibility, where identities shift, time dilates, and the imagination takes root. Ilyas Kassam’s work Yin Ousia neatly captures this tension. Conceived through the artist’s meditation practice and painted using volcanic sand from Lanzarote, Spain the work is pulsing with energetic tension of something about to happen. From this we can see that these spaces are not inert but in fact rich with an energy of their own, as one moment gives way to another.
