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.
While Romanticism traditionally positioned humanity before the grandeur of nature, here the gaze turns toward a world where agency and presence emerge from plants, mannequins, and imagined ecologies rather than human protagonists. Rather than projecting dystopian collapse, the work presents a quieter and more introspective posthuman vision—shaped by stillness, endurance, and the slow time of nonhuman rhythm.
In Appleby’s acrylic paintings, flora take on a near-sentient presence, inhabiting interiors and symbolic terrains where light, personal objects, and memory coalesce. His early engagement with retro video game aesthetics has gradually given way to a more contemplative visual language—one in which imagined landscapes emerge from the textures of the everyday. Familiar domestic spaces—a bedroom landing, a spare room, a distant hillside in the northwest of England—unfold into sites of quiet revelation. In one image, a reclining figure gently recalls the contours of a northern hill; in another, the plant becomes a gesture toward knowledge and interdependence. Orchids, bonsais, and daffodils serve as witnesses to solitude, duration, and inner transformation. Here, the divine is not distant but embedded—in the glint of a ring, the curve of a stem—where the domestic and the transcendental coexist. His work affirms that the nonhuman world is not a backdrop, but a reflective presence with its own quiet agency.
Jiang’s ink paintings turn the inquiry inward, reconfiguring the posthuman body through which the biological and the artificial are blurred within classical references and digital logics. Her cyborgian figures recline within staged interiors, suspended between self and screen, natural form and synthetic surface. Imagined flora, a recurring and significant motif in her practice, complicates this boundary further; hermaphroditic plant forms blur distinctions between human and nonhuman, body and environment, introducing a vegetal agency that is both symbolic and sensual. Executed with the refined precision of traditional Chinese gongbi technique, Jiang’s work merges with psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, producing figures that are hyper-stylised yet emotionally ambiguous. Here, sexuality, perception, and femininity fragment and reform in stillness. The body appears both composed and exposed, theatrical yet introspective—a site of self-recognition that is always mediated.
Together, Appleby and Jiang construct an ecosystem in which human presence is decentred rather than erased. Their work does not mourn the human; it outgrows it, gesturing toward new modes of coexistence and relationality. Romance Without Us proposes an aesthetic of persistence. Their practices compel a reconsideration of presence and subjectivity in an era increasingly shaped by ecological precarity and digital mediation, inviting an ethics of attentiveness to the diverse forms of being that populate contemporary existence.
