Explore the experiences of Londoners during the Second World War and the effect it had on the city they knew.
Private view for the exhibition What lasts doesn't always hold shape, at Hypha Gallery 2 / No. 1 Poultry
What lasts doesn’t always hold shape asks what it means to endure when change is the only constant. Curated by Taylor Hall and Rebecca Jak, it brings together works by Marian Drew, Levent Ozruh, and Jobe Burns.
Drew, Ozruh and Burns respond directly to No. 1 Poultry by engaging with the physical and symbolic life of the stone that envelops the building’s façade. Long associated with endurance, stone is reframed as a witness to deep time and a register of human fragility, intervention, ideology and cultural projection.
Its capacity to endure is understood not as something guaranteed by the material alone, but as something sustained through the ongoing negotiation of care and use. Across the exhibition, each artist resists resolution in favour of open-endedness. Here, materiality becomes a co-collaborator, through which what lasts is understood as continually shaped, negotiated and re-authored.
