Flatmates 37 opens with SOFT SERVE, a group exhibition bringing together five artists whose practices consider belonging, vulnerability, material memory and the unstable boundaries between bodies, objects and places.
Shared by NORITO, starch and Teaspoon Projects, Flatmates 37 takes its name and structure seriously: three independent programmes inhabiting one space. Rather than operating as a gallery with a singular curatorial voice, it is conceived as a place of cohabitation — a rotating programme of exhibitions by each of its three ‘flatmates’, punctuated by collective exhibitions such as SOFT SERVE.
The exhibition begins with a contemporary idea of home as something increasingly personal, shared and abstract. In cosmopolitan lives, home is often less tied to a single place than to people, habits, objects, memories and temporary forms of belonging. Across the works, home is inherited, withheld, reconstructed and carried between places, shaped as much by displacement as by intimacy. Familiar materials and forms become slightly strange, reflecting the instability of belonging when home is something we continually make, lose and remake.
SOFT SERVE also proposes a way of thinking about hospitality. Flatmates 37 is interested in forms of gathering that do not depend on a singular host or centre. Instead, hospitality becomes reciprocal: a willingness to make room for different positions, to relinquish control, and to create conditions in which uncertainty and vulnerability are not treated as weaknesses. The exhibition embraces this instability — between host and guest, belonging and estrangement, protection and exposure, the organic and the manufactured.
London-based Venezuelan artist Francisca Sosa López explores materiality and process through shifting definitions of home, migration, femininity and cultural contrast. Working with materials that can travel back and forth across the Atlantic, she extends drawing into thread, beads and textile, making portability part of the work’s relationship to place. In Bamboleo de detalles ambigüos (Swaying of Ambiguous Details), a Margarita hammock becomes both painting and object. Weaving, repetition and intervention bring forms of making historically associated with women into dialogue with the language of painting, while the hammock itself hovers between domestic utility, memory and exhibition object.
This sense of home as something carried, inherited and never entirely secure also runs through Cansu Yıldıran’s Dispossessed series. Made in the Kuşmer Highlands in northern Turkey, where their family has roots, the photographs emerge from a landscape to which Yıldıran is deeply connected yet cannot fully lay claim. Women, animals and the landscape form a collective presence within images that are tender and uncanny, marked by histories of gendered inheritance and dispossession. Yıldıran describes this condition as being “guests for life”: belonging intimately to a place while remaining, in some sense, outside it.
Questions of who or what occupies the centre shift again in Chok Si Xuan’s installations. Working with found electronics and industrial materials, Chok looks to cybernetics and the feedback systems connecting humans, living organisms and machines. Her environments resist a stable hierarchy between body and apparatus, organic and manufactured, allowing agency to circulate through the systems she constructs. If home can be understood as a network of relations rather than a fixed site, Chok pushes that network beyond the human, towards the objects, technologies and organisms with which we continually share space.
A related surrender of control appears in Ruijin Song’s approach to making. Working across painting, ceramics, metalwork and printmaking, Song describes the studio as an expanding inner ‘burrow’: intuitive, secretive and without a predetermined route. Images are layered, rotated and interrupted until familiar ways of seeing begin to loosen. Her sensitivity to death, labour and fragile forms of existence gives this process an emotional weight; vulnerability becomes less a subject to depict than a condition through which the work is allowed to emerge.
Mithra Jeevananthan’s practice explores speculative ecologies and chimeric spaces. Through sculpture and installation, she combines references to flora, fauna, insects, and biological systems with industrial materials such as welded metal, plastics, readymade objects, laser-cut elements, and fabricated structures. These fragments are distorted, reconstructed, and brought together to form unfamiliar habitats that resist fixed interpretation. The work considers how imagined environments might develop their own systems and relationships, creating spaces that feel simultaneously beautiful, unsettling, and difficult to classify. Welcome to My Island is an ongoing exploration of world-building through mutation, transformation, and the possibility of landscapes that exist somewhere between reality and fiction.
Together, the works in SOFT SERVE resist the idea that belonging requires certainty. They propose instead something gentler and more permeable: identities formed through contact, homes assembled from fragments, and spaces made meaningful through the people, materials and memories temporarily held within them.
As the first exhibition at Flatmates 37, SOFT SERVE makes its position clear: loosen the centre; belonging is something we make together.
Ahn’s paintings develop from things she encounters and collects in her everyday life. These include photographs of streets and landscapes she takes while walking, fragments from dreams, and passages from literature. She brings these different sources together through drawings, making a loose collection of images that can later become paintings. Some drawings lead to paintings she starts the following week, while others may stay with her for a year before returning as the basis for a new work.
Arbers Aly takes its title from a broken version of Barbers Alley, a real street in East London. In one of Ahn’s source photographs, the letter B is obscured, so the name appears as Arbers Alley. What begins as an accidental change becomes part of the work. The altered name points to a street that is familiar but also anonymous, with some of its specificity removed. It reflects Ahn’s growing attention to the ordinary streets and overlooked corners that make up her everyday surroundings.
In a two-person exhibition at NORITO in December 2025, Ahn presented Nocturnal Apparition 2025) alongside smaller works, creating a theatrical streetscape of East London. Compared with her earlier paintings, the work brought in more ordinary and contemporary figures, including a hooded figure and an infant. The frontal composition remained, allowing the painting to function like a stage where several narratives could unfold at once. In Arbers Aly, this sense of a stage moves further into everyday life. The work came from a moment Ahn observed on a red bus on her way home one evening. As the bus moved through the city, each view through the window seemed to become a stage beneath the street lanterns. The figures appearing and disappearing in the light seemed almost as though they had arrived after a performance had already ended. The new body of works in this exhibition looks beyond the main stage, toward anonymous figures, peripheral spaces, and empty streets encountered between dawn and dusk.
Light remains central to Ahn’s practice. It becomes a way of moving between the imaginary and the real, giving uncertain or unstable forms a temporary presence within the image. Ahn works with overlapping imagery and different layers of paint, using light to connect the personal and the collective, the visible and the unseen. The images never settle into a single reading. Instead, they become less certain the closer they are looked at.
This is also reflected in the surfaces of the paintings. Thin and thick passages of oil sit alongside controlled and loose brushwork, while rough splashes appear next to more refined areas. Together with the hovering, neon-like light, these different ways of painting create a shifting field of perception.
Across her practice, Ahn repeatedly returns to the idea of loosening. She loosens the drawings, the paintings, and the narratives that move through them. In doing so, she allows them to remain open, contingent, and encompassing.
