SOFT MECHANICS: Difference, Repetition, Life
OPENING NIGHT: Wednesday, April 1 , 6 — 8 pm
PERFORMANCE: ‘The door never fully closed’ by artist Trang Dinh and ‘Queer touch’ by artist ZHIQIANG LI
EXHIBITION DATES: April 1 – 5, 2026
OPENING HOURS: 12:30 — 6:00 pm
LOCATION: 103 Murray Grove, London N1 7QP
FEATURED ARTISTS:
George Stamenov @stamenov.s.g , Daebie Kim @daebiemos , Yasemin Gunhos @yasemingunhos , Yilina Yang @yilina.yang , Choin @ee.choin , Zhiqiang Li @qiangqiangzhizhi , Eveleigh-Evans @eveleigh_evans , Gabriela Cygan @gabriela.cygan , Maria Helena Toscano @m.h.toscano , Trang Dinh @abluefurboot___
Photo @pluslap
“Life is about rhythm. we vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood. we are a rhythm machine, that’s what we are.” – Mickey Hart.
We are rhythm before we are anything else — pulse before thought, vibration before language. The heart does not ask permission to beat. The breath does not wait for instruction. Long before we learn to measure time, we are already living inside it: cycling, looping, returning. Soft Mechanics begins here, with the body as a system that is never quite still, never quite the same twice.
The title holds a deliberate tension. Soft — because what this exhibition attends to is not the hard mechanics of machines and engineering, but the yielding, porous, responsive nature of living systems. Bodies that absorb and emit. Surfaces that register pressure and memory. Forms that hold sensation without fixing it. Mechanics — because there is structure here too, pattern and repetition, the underlying grammar that makes variation possible in the first place. Without the loop, there is no deviation. Without the beat, there is no syncopation. The works in this exhibition live in that productive friction: between system and sensation, between what repeats and what changes in the repeating.
Repetition, in this context, is not sameness. It is the condition under which difference becomes visible. A gesture returns — but the body that made it has shifted. A sound recurs — but the room has changed, and so have you. This is where life reveals itself: not in the stable and the fixed, but in the small deviations that accumulate into something new. In biology, in emotion, in social life, in technology — change does not arrive from outside. It emerges from within the rhythm itself, carried in the gap between one beat and the next.
Soft Mechanics brings together ten artists working across sculpture, installation, painting, sound, digital media, and live performance — each approaching the body not as a fixed object but as a responsive field. Bodies here sense and are sensed. They absorb signals and generate them. They move through cycles of tension and release, exposure and withdrawal, presence and delay. They leak, resonate, record, and transform.
Some works hold that tension in material form. George Stamenov’s carved cherry wood reliefs suspend civilisation mid-transition — neither progress nor decay, but the charged moment between the two, where the technological and the handmade press against each other. Daebie Kim paints the frequency that exists before and after language: a silent chord centred on a void, hovering at the edge of recognition, inviting the viewer to tune into something primal and internal. Gabriela Cygan’s large oil paintings refuse to settle — familiar forms dismantled and rebuilt, paint operating simultaneously as rupture and record, capturing a world in the act of collapsing and reconstructing itself.
Touch moves through the exhibition as both subject and method. Zhiqiang Li’s wearable sound installation Queer Touchturns the body into a live instrument: every shift of weight, every proximity, every contact with space generates sound. The body is not a passive carrier of technology — it composes. To move is to make music; to be touched is to produce resonance. Yasemin Gunhos casts a virtual self-portrait in translucent resin, materialising the digital and suspending it between presence and absence, weight and immateriality, the rendered and the held. Eveleigh-Evans arranges semi-precious mineral spheres in a calibrated ring around a central void — not absence, but interval: the organising silence that makes rhythm possible, the rest between notes that gives the pattern meaning.
Other works follow what cannot be controlled or contained. Choin traces the body’s internal flows — sensations that seep before they are noticed, a queerness that arrives like shoes already wet, a leakage that reveals itself only in the surfaces it has quietly altered. Maria Helena Toscano brings field recordings gathered in the Amazon into material form: drawings and fingerprints produced while listening, marks left by a body absorbing and re-emitting vibration. These are not illustrations of sound. They are what the body does when it truly hears — somatic inscriptions, tactile recordings of sonic encounter. Yilina Yang’s ceramic sculpture knots wings into a starburst form, finished in a bullet-toned metallic glaze that catches light while the core stays dark — beauty and quiet violence folded into the same gesture, the surface luminous, the interior withheld.
Two live performances anchor the exhibition in time and presence. Trang Dinh’s The Door That Never Fully Closedassembles hacked toys, found objects, dollhouse furniture, and doll figures into an interactive sound performance — a fragile domestic fever dream in which the inanimate is asked to imitate the living, and feeling returns through constructed form. Out of friction between gesture and noise, a broken song begins to form: a private archaeology of tenderness, trauma, and confinement. Zhiqiang Li performs Queer Touch live, the wearable disrupting habitual gesture and reorienting the performer’s relationship to space — sound arising from moments of disorientation and embodied negotiation, the body co-creating a dynamic interplay of space, technology, and corporeal presence.
Set against a present defined by speed, overload, and the constant demand to process and perform, Soft Mechanics holds open a different kind of attention — slower, more attuned to the minor and the felt, to what accumulates beneath the threshold of the visible. What do we let in? What do we filter out? What kinds of rhythms shape us — biological, emotional, social, technological — and which ones can still be remade? These are not abstract questions. In the works gathered here, they take on material form: in carved wood and ceramic, in translucent resin and wax, in wearable electronics and Amazon field recordings, in hacked toys and painted canvas. Each work is a different way of listening. Together, they compose something like a score — not to be read, but felt.
The Door Never Fully Closed, a live performance by artist Trang Dinh @abluefurboot___
The Door That Never Fully Closed assembles hacked toys, found objects, and dollhouse fragments into an interactive sound performance — a fragile domestic fever dream in which the inanimate is asked to imitate the living, and feeling returns through constructed form. Out of the friction between gesture and noise, a broken song begins to form: a private archaeology of tenderness, trauma, and confinement.
QUEER TOUCH a live performance by artist ZHIQIANG LI @qiangqiangzhizhi
Queer Touch is a wearable sound installation that transforms the body into a live instrument — every gesture, shift of balance, and moment of contact generating sonic variations that compose an evolving acoustic field. Movement becomes composition, touch becomes resonance, and “queer” here names not only identity but a deliberate deviation from habitual ways of sensing and inhabiting space.
Artworks details:
George Stamenov
TIR
48x36x10cm
Carved cherry wood
The TIR series are works combining traditional sculptural methods with contemporary techniques.
Like ancient reliefs that narrate complex histories through frozen moments, these sculptures embody the technological and industrial forces shaping contemporary life. They are artefacts of a civilisation in transition — bas-reliefs that function simultaneously as document and critique. Here, sculpture is not merely an object but a record of its time, marked by tensions between progress and decay, permanence and obsolescence.
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Eleigh-Evans
Token 2025
Semi-precious minerals, shell biopolymer
17x17x7cm
TOKEN (Minerals / Shell) presents a circular system—orbital, calibrated—in which discrete mineral “units” are set in a measured ring around a central void. Read as part adornment, part tool, and part tuned scale, each sphere becomes a resonant object—a note: distinct in colour, density, and provenance, yet held in a shared rhythm through spacing, sequence, and return. The circle operates as a soft machine—both instrument and cosmological diagram—where meaning accrues through repetition rather than narrative: as you move around it, the work “plays” through shifting angle, light, and attention.
The void is not absence but interval. Like a rest in music or the pause between breaths, it acts as an organising silence that charges the surrounding forms. Rhythm emerges as arrangement and omission—what is placed, what is withheld, and how the gaps regulate the whole. In this way, TOKEN frames repetition as both embodied mechanism (pulse/breath) and cultural technology (ritual/protection): a cycle that returns again and again to the same elements, while difference surfaces through minute variations—of stone, of perception, of time.
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Trang Dinh
The Door That Never Fully Closed, 2025
Interactive sound performance with hacked toys and found objects
Dimensions: Variable dimensions
The Door That Never Fully Closed approaches the body as a soft mechanical system of memory, repetition, and emotional residue. Through interactive sound performance, hacked toys, found objects, dollhouse furniture, wigs, and doll figures gather into a fragile domestic fever dream, where the inanimate is asked to imitate the living, and feeling returns through constructed forms. Out of the friction between gesture and noise, a broken song begins to form. What remains is a private archaeology of tenderness, trauma, and confinement.
NFS
Yilina Yang
Collapse
60x 45x 25 cm, ceramics
Collapse draws from uncanny bird poses in historical hunting-trophy paintings.
A headless knot of wings is pinched and interlocked into a starburst form. Finished with
a bullet-toned metallic glaze, the glossy surface catches light while the core remains dark, balancing beauty with a quiet violence central to vanities.
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Yasemin Gunhos
Haptic Ghost
3D printed translucent resin
10 x 17 x 2,5 cm
Haptic Ghost translates a 3D modelled virtual self-portrait into translucent resin,
a material that carries weight, fragility and texture. Translucency serves as a material condition of the virtual, suspending the work between presence and absence, tangible and immaterial. Where digital geometry meets physical matter, light catches the surface and the shadows of a virtual scene become visible.
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Choin
Saliva carries language away
Wax, aluminium
Choin’s work begins with embodied sensations that are never fully contained — always leaking out, always delayed. These sensations have no clear beginning or end; they linger just before arrival, or exist in a subtly deferred state. A rhythm is present, but not one that starts with a single beat. It is closer to a pulse that pauses before starting, or something already underway but only noticed when one turns their head — like the weather outside a window.
Where earlier work attended to the minute internal flows of the body, Choin’s recent practice shifts toward the plumbing through which such flows pass, are delayed, and sometimes leak. Plumbing leaks are not felt directly; they seep into wallpaper and ceilings, surfaces one suddenly finds already damp. This slow self-revelation resonates with his sense of queerness — not something that announces itself, but a foreignness that has already arrived unnoticed, like shoes that have grown wet without one realising.
Following this sensation of leakage, Choin’s work traces the delayed temporality and rhythm of what flows within and beyond the body.
NFS
Zhiqiang Li
Queer Touch
25 × 8 cm
Multimedia
Queer Touch is a wearable sound installation that translates touch into sound. Through embodied interaction, participants generate an evolving soundscape that distorts and reconfigures how the world can be sensed and imagined.
Zhiqiang Li’s Queer Touch is a wearable performance project that transforms the body into a musical instrument. Through sensors and embodied interaction, the body generates sound by moving through and responding to its environment. Each gesture, shift of balance, proximity, and touch produces sonic variations, composing a live acoustic field shaped by spatial relations.
The work explores how technology mediates bodily perception and how sound can emerge from the friction between body and space. Rather than treating music as something externally performed, Zhiqiang Li situates it within the body’s relational experience — where movement becomes composition and contact becomes resonance.
The term “queer” refers not only to identity, but to a deviation from normative modes of interaction. The wearable disrupts habitual gestures, reorienting the performer’s relationship to space and technology, with sound arising from moments of disorientation and embodied negotiation. In this project, the body is not a passive carrier of technology, but an active, sounding instrument — co-creating a dynamic interplay of space, technology, and corporeal presence.
NFS
Maria Helena Toscano
Forest Echoes – Material Traces, 2026
Calabash gourd, acoustic foam, copal resin, tracing paper, plastic sleeve, annatto on paper, inkjet print, amplifier, transducer & sound on board. Dimension 32cm x 68cm (Without transducer)
Forest Echoes – Material Traces emerges from the ongoing research project Forest Echoes, where sound operates as offering, memory, and speculative communication with more-than-human worlds. Developed through field recordings gathered and modulated in the Amazon using modular synthesis, the work investigates how sonic encounters are translated into sound, images and material form. Collage and sound operate as an assemblage of interrelated processes. Fragments are layered and housed within protective sleeves, forming a structure that is both archive and membrane. The drawings and fingerprints were produced while listening to and modulating these field recordings in the Amazon, emerging directly from the sonic process itself. They are not illustrations of sound; they are tactile recordings — bodily residues of sonic encounter. These marks function as somatic inscriptions: traces produced as the body listens, vibrates, and responds. Rather than representing acoustic data, the works register how vibration is absorbed, processed, and re-emitted through touch. Sound becomes mark. Listening becomes gesture.
A transducer placed in a corner of the composition emits low, internal vibration. Sound does not dominate the room; it inhabits it. Echo operates as dispersal — persistent, diffused, atmospheric. The work approaches listening as a generative epistemology — a way of sensing across temporalities and species.
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Daebie Kim
Silent Chord
95cm x 75cm; oil on canvas
Silent Chord is an inquiry into the symptoms of being that exist before and after language. Centered around a central void where forms hover between recognition and dissolution, the painting invites the viewer to tune into a primal frequency. A silent, internal rhythm that escapes the social constructs of the grid.
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Gabriela Cygan
no title landscape, 2023
110x80cm, oil on canvas
No Title Landscape is an oil on canvas measuring 110x80cm. The work resists the conventions implied by its title — landscape here is not a stable view but a fractured field, where familiar forms are dismantled and reassembled into something unstable and dream-like. Paint operates as both record and rupture, capturing a world mid-collapse and mid-construction. The piece sits within Cygan’s broader interest in rhythm, mutation, and the tension between legibility and resistance to meaning.
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