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.
The me-inside-the-mirror is the opposite of me and yet looks quite like me – It’s a pity / For I cannot agonize over and examine the me-inside-the-mirror
-Yi Sang, Mirror
Yi Sang, a key figure in modern Korean literature, is known for his avant-garde and surrealist style, which broke from traditional literary forms. His works were significantly ahead of their time, blending elements of surrealism, cubism, and Dadaism—artistic movements he was influenced by, particularly from the West. His career as a writer gained limited recognition during his short life. Today, he is considered a foundational figure in Korean modernism and a symbol of creative resistance against the conformity of his era.
Through the Shattered Mirror of Yi Sang is an exploration of identity, memory, and emotion through the metaphor of reflection and fragmentation. Drawing from Yi Sang’s recurring motif of the ‘mirror’, this exhibition unfolds as a surreal narrative, challenging traditional notions of self as wholeness and completeness. As we journey through life, half-awake and half-dreaming, we encounter complex motifs of dualism—loneliness and connection, joy and sorrow, human and animal, healing and destruction. These contrasting forces weave through the exhibition, highlighting the tension between transformation and stasis.
Jingyi Li’s soft lace takes the sharp form of butter knives, while reimagined selves in Jiyeon Ryu, Estelle Simpson and Cayetano S.D Santamaria’s surrealist paintings dominate altered realities. Roberta DeCaro’s Tears for Breakfast takes the shape of lacrimarium thought to encase the traces of grief during Roman time giving physical form to what is often invisible. Liu Kim’s Anicca series, marked by broken and imperfect forms, meditates on fragmentation and the impermanence of existence, while Hongil Yoon’s fragmented viewpoints reveal the multiple realities people navigate today. The juxtaposition of the known and the unknown, the human and the animalistic, creates a disquieting sense of the uncanny, inviting viewers into a world where everything feels slightly out of place, yet eerily recognisable.
Through the Shattered Mirror of Yi Sang was inspired by a conversation with Ryu, one of the featured artists, about works based on Yi Sang’s poetry. The exhibition bridges literature and visual art, reintroducing the tradition of their close interaction while addressing the historical divide between the two in Eastern contexts. It invites viewers to engage with Korean modernist literature, which had been overshadowed by Korea’s oppressed past but is now regaining recognition. By doing so, this exhibition not only sheds light on Yi Sang's literary legacy but also encourages the audience to view visual art through the lens of literary movements.
