Last month, at The Black Shop in King’s Cross, Wedge staged 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, provided 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 assembled conditions where images echoed, matter unsettled, and perception sliped. Recursion here was not only a visual motif but a material and psychological state: surfaces fractured, drifted, and refracted, while the edges of image and object dissolved into duplication and spectral return. Across sculpture, moving image, and installation, the exhibition unfolded less as a collection than as a recursive field, where what appeared stable was always already folded 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.
Wedge
Works produced with a mix of digital tools (CAD, LiDAR scanning, Unreal Engine) and traditional processes (ceramic, textile, resin, photography). Materials include sand, resin, cloth, ceramic, aluminium, and film.
Artists: Arko Bhowmik | Anastasia Solodov | Choga (Design Collective) | Duru Bebekoğlu | Jiaqing Chen | Lifeng Liao | Valeriia Chemerisova | Yasemin Gunhos | Yier Lu | Yilun Liu | Yuchen Wu & Rockforth Datuin
Curatorial Team: Lei Zhang | Peiyan Zou / Production & Exhibition Support: Andy Zhang | Tina Wu | Yinuo Pan | Yuhan Wu / Dates: 2025/09/14 – 2025/09/20
