Symbol
On recurring forms, inherited structures, and figures that surface across cultures.
Beneath individual myths lies a layer of recurring figures, the shadow, the double, the trickster, the hero, shared across cultures and epochs. Whether understood as psychological structures or cultural repetitions, certain forms return so persistently across art history that their recurrence demands attention. This exhibition gathers works that engage the archetypal not as illustration but as a formal problem, asking why certain configurations of the human continue to appear, and what their persistence reveals about the present.
On the figure of exception, and the structure of ascent, trial, and return.
The hero is the organizing figure of narrative: a singular body set apart, moving through ordeal toward transformation. This structure, departure, struggle, return, orders not only myth but the logic of individual achievement and artistic production. The hero stands as both subject and measure, defined through action, endurance, and recognition.
Yet the hero is never neutral. The figure is constructed through selection, who is allowed to occupy it, whose journey is made visible, and whose remains excluded.
On transgression, liminality, and the figure who operates between orders.
The trickster is a boundary-crosser: a figure who violates categories, redistributes knowledge, and destabilizes systems without fully belonging to any side. Neither inside nor outside, neither fixed nor stable, the trickster operates in the space between. This exhibition considers the trickster not as a character but as a structural position, one that makes contradiction and movement legible as intelligence rather than error.
On the votive, the relic, and what makes a thing exceed its material.
Some objects carry a charge beyond their physical properties, a surplus of meaning produced through designation, ritual, or belief. Set apart from ordinary use, they demand a different form of attention. This exhibition examines how such conditions persist in contemporary art: how objects acquire intensity, and what that reveals about the relationship between material and meaning.
On the image that means something other than what it shows.
Allegory operates through substitution: one form standing consistently for another. Though displaced by modernist emphasis on immediacy and self-sufficiency, allegory persists as a structure that allows complex ideas to be carried through images. This exhibition examines its continued use, what it enables, and why indirect meaning remains necessary.
On origin, creation, and the image of beginnings.
Every culture produces accounts of how the world began, from void to division, from chaos to order. These narratives share structural patterns across distance and time. This exhibition considers how artists construct and reimagine origins, not as illustration of existing myths but as a way of questioning how beginnings are formed and what they determine.
On revision, repositioning, and the story told from elsewhere.
Myth is not fixed; it is shaped by those who tell it. To return to a myth is to enter it again from a different position, altering its structure and its emphasis. This exhibition considers acts of rewriting as a critical operation, exposing what was excluded, shifting perspective, and reconfiguring narrative from within.
On signs that lose their referents and the image that outlasts its meaning.
Symbols depend on shared meaning, and when that structure dissolves, the image remains while its significance fades or shifts. What was once charged becomes unstable or open. This exhibition examines the moment when symbols detach from their origins, their erosion, transformation, or reactivation, and what remains when meaning is no longer fixed.
On the hybrid, the boundary, and the figure that should not exist.
The monster emerges at the limits of classification: where categories break down and forms combine. It marks the boundaries cultures construct, between human and animal, natural and artificial, inside and outside. This exhibition considers the monstrous as a structural condition, asking what these figures reveal about the systems that produce them.
On descent, the below, and what is retrieved from it.
The movement downward, into darkness, depth, or concealment, is a recurring structure. The underworld is both a place of the dead and a site of knowledge unavailable on the surface. This exhibition considers descent as a model: entering what is hidden, and returning altered, or not returning at all.
On constructed narratives and the stories that organize the present.
Contemporary life continuously produces its own myths, systems of meaning that present themselves as natural while remaining constructed. These narratives shape perception, identity, and value. This exhibition gathers works that make such structures visible, revealing how the present is organized through stories that often remain unexamined.
On the artist who turns the apparatus on themselves, and what looking inward produces.
The self-portrait is one of the most persistent forms of identity in art: the artist as their own subject, the gaze turned back on the one who holds the brush or the camera. But the self-portrait is never simply autobiography, it is a construction, a performance of selfhood that reveals as much about the conventions of representation as it does about the person represented. From unflinching depictions of aging to staged disappearances into constructed personas to the use of the selfie as a critical form, the self-portrait asks what it means to make an image of oneself and whether that image can ever be trusted as a record of what is actually there.
On desire, illegibility, and identities that refuse the available categories.
Queerness in art is not only a subject but a formal proposition: the refusal of normative structures through which identity and desire are organized. It does not simply represent experience, it asks what forms become possible when categories are treated as contingent rather than fixed. This exhibition considers queerness as an aesthetic and structural condition: works that refuse resolution, hold contradictions, and propose forms of relation and subjectivity that remain outside stable naming.
On designation, authority, and identity assigned from outside.
The name is often given before the self can accept or refuse it, carrying the weight of history, culture, and expectation. To change it is to intervene in that structure; to impose it is to define from outside. This exhibition considers naming as an operation: how identity is shaped through language, how names carry inherited meanings, and how they can be adopted, altered, or withheld as material.
On concealment, the persona, and what the face beneath the face reveals.
The mask is a technology of transformation: it removes one identity and substitutes another, suspending the obligations attached to a known face. It operates across contexts, ritual, performance, anonymity, but always produces a shift in what can be said or done. This exhibition considers masking as both formal and strategic: what becomes possible when identity is withheld, and what the persistence of the mask reveals about the structures that bind the visible self.
On collaborative practice, shared authorship, and identity that cannot be singular.
The idea of the individual artist with a singular vision is one of modernity’s most persistent constructions. Yet collaborative and collective practices have always existed alongside it. This exhibition considers the collective self as an alternative model: where authorship is distributed, where the singular name is replaced by a shared one, and where identity emerges through relation rather than isolation.