Mise en Abyme: London — contemporary art curated through the lens of film noir

At The Black Shop in King’s Cross, Wedge stages Mise en Abyme: London, an exhibition shaped by the looping temporality of Alain Resnais’s 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad. The film’s recursive narrative, where memory and image continually fold back on themselves, provides the curatorial anchor: a sense of drift in which perception cannot quite settle, and repetition becomes its own form of distortion. The title “mise en abyme” refers to this condition of infinite reflection — an image within an image, a story within a story — where nothing remains stable.

Rather than treating works as fixed forms, the exhibition assembles conditions where images echo, matter unsettles, and perception slips. Recursion here is not only a visual motif but a material and psychological state: surfaces fracture, drift, and refract, while the edges of image and object dissolve into duplication and spectral return. Across sculpture, moving image, and installation, the exhibition unfolds less as a collection than as a recursive field, where what appears stable is always already folding back into repetition.

Arko Bhowmik’s Lithium Futures situates ecological extraction within buried media and cinematic fragments, conjuring planetary futures through the instability of their infrastructures. Jiaqing Chen’s When the Moon Rises extends this instability into vision itself, where screen-based landscapes appear and erode in cycles of clarity and loss. Anastasia Solodov’s Cold Iconic Series reanimates devotional imagery in fragile materials — resin, bread, embroidered cloth — destabilising the relation between icon and objecthood.

Other works converge around fabrication and decay. Choga (Design Collective)’s Naturafacture assembles sand, ceramic, and aluminium into architectures that oscillate between organic growth and synthetic construction. Valeriia Chemerisova pursues the paradox of preservation and disintegration, where sculptural form holds the trace of its own disappearance. Duru Bebekoğlu’s recomposed X-rays and negatives register memory as spectral exposure: a condition where presence flickers into absence.

Together, these works do not resolve into statements but form a mise en abyme: a recursive field where reflection becomes entanglement. The exhibition is conceived less as a group of discrete objects than as an unfolding terrain of echoes, distortions, and mirrored fictions — a space in which nothing appears the same twice.