THE CITY LISTENS BACK
EXHIBITION DATES: November 13 – 16, 2025
OPENING NIGHT: Thursday, November 13, 6 — 9 pm
LOCATION: PURIST Gallery, 114 King’s Cross Rd, London WC1X 9DS
EXHIBITION CONCEPT:
Microclimates, pigeons, algae on canal walls, ride-sharing data, soil sensors, CCTV acoustics, and our own biometrics all co-produce a living feedback loop. THE CITY LISTENS BACK invites works that treat the city as a sentient mesh: code like mycelium, rivers as data pipes, bodies as antennas. We’re interested in practices that pair technology with organism — bio-sensing wearables, machine-learning trained on field recordings, e-waste turned habitat, speculative infrastructures that host both networks and nonhuman life. The show asks: when every surface is instrumented and every organism emits a signal, who is actually listening — and to whom?
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Amanda Bennetts @amanda_bennetts_ , Nick Walter @n__walt , Yujin Jung @_yuijn , Jack Jessé & Paula Molina @jack__jesse @paulandreamolina , Katya Tsareva @katyatsareva_artist , Dot Als @dot_als_ , Judy Maxwell-McNicol @weemoodyjudy , Vi @vikalinski , Bill Wang Yi @wangyi_bill , Daniel Widrig @danielwidrig , Kirill Basalaev @kirill.basalaev.art , Mashai @mashai_art
Photo by @plus1ap
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Amanda Bennetts @amanda_bennetts_ , Nick Walter @n__walt , Yujin Jung @_yuijn , Jack Jessé & Paula Molina @jack__jesse @paulandreamolina , Katya Tsareva @katyatsareva_artist , Dot Als @dot_als_ , Judy Maxwell-McNicol @weemoodyjudy , Vi @vikalinski , Bill Wang Yi @wangyi_bill , Daniel Widrig @danielwidrig , Kirill Basalaev @kirill.basalaev.art , Mashai @mashai_art
AMANDA BENNETTS @amanda_bennetts_
LATENCY + LACERATIONS, 2025
DIGITAL FILM, 9 MINUTES
NFS
The film Latency + Lacerations traces the terrestrial path of an undersea fibre-optic internet cable from the on-land data centre on the Sunshine Coast, Australia, to the beach shore, situating a body living with illness and disability as the instrument of measure. Between flesh and data, the work summons an ontological séance where the algorithmic doppelgänger moves ahead as a predictive ghost, while the medicalised body lags in embodied time.
The filmed performance treats the city as a sentient mesh, where the body becomes an antenna within its circuitry. Camera, edit, and a digital-textured score move between drift and pulse, translating latency into a temporal practice, a crip pacing that reclaims time as material, lived, and relational. Within this choreography of delay, perception and infrastructure converge, dissolving the boundary between sensor and sensed, listening with precise tenderness: a divided body insisting on being felt, and a city that, momentarily, listens back.
NICK WALTER @n__walt
FROM THE SERIES FACES: PAULA NO. 1
ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT ON HAHNEMÜHLE PHOTO RAG ULTRA SMOOTH, UNFRAMED, 841 × 1189 MM,
EDITION OF 5 + 1 AP
CONTACT info@pai32.com FOR PRICE REQUEST
Allies (2020–2025) I investigate the relational ecologies of perception that emerge in the aftermath of trauma. The work departs from portraiture yet extends beyond psychological representation: it explores how human affect, environment, and image coalesce into a responsive system — a fragile sensorium that continuously reconfigures itself. The individuals I photograph are not portrayed as victims but as complex agents within a dense field of perceptual feedback. Trauma, here, functions less as an event than as an ongoing modulation of signal and noise: an altered mode of attainment to the world. Within this state, sensory overload and affective numbness coexist, generating subtle shifts in how bodies register light, space, and presence.
By engaging the photographic medium as an interface rather than a mere representational device, Allies approaches the camera as a sensor within a wider network of exchange — between interior states and external environments, memory and data, visibility and opacity.
The resulting images oscillate between documentation and abstraction, suggesting a porous boundary between human and technological perception. In the context of THE CITY LISTENS BACK, Allies can be read as a study of embodied listening: an exploration of how psychic and ecological systems mutually reverberate. The portraits become sites where the human nervous system meets the sensory infrastructures of the city — where trauma itself behaves like an ambient frequency, shaping how both organisms and environments perceive, respond, and remember.
YUJIN JUNG @_yuijn
MAPPING THE MYSTERIES
45 × 27 CM
OIL ON CANVAS
CONTACT info@pai32.com FOR PRICE REQUEST
The work visualises the sensation of navigating through fragments of memory and perception, where forms emerge and dissolve within shifting layers of colour. It reflects my ongoing exploration into how painting can trace the invisible process of sensing and remembering.
JACK JESSÉ & PAULA MOLINA @jack__jesse @paulandreamolina
CAUGHT ON CCTV, 2025
2M X 1M X 0.6M
MIXED MEDIA INSTALLATION, NATURAL DYE PRINTS
CONTACT info@pai32.com FOR PRICE REQUEST
This installation reimagines how we archive botanical materials by shifting focus from the preserved specimens to their surrounding liquids – a material witness to ecological violence and historical change. Displayed across sixteen CRT monitors, unique animations, scans, and textures relate to a variety of specific specimen jars drawn from the Spirit Collection held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Each screen acts as a digital portal into the lives of these specimens, offering glimpses into alternative historical narratives.
Visitors are invited to take away screen prints made from these digital scans, turning the archive into a participatory, living exchange. As the prints fade, they echo the entropy of both organic matter and digital files, exposing the fragility of what we choose to preserve. Moving from analogue specimen, to digital image, and back to physical print, the work challenges dominant notions of preservation – asking to consider whose stories are told, who decides what is worth keeping, and whether there can be wisdom in letting certain things disappear.
KATYA TSAREVA @katyatsareva_artist
{2}, 2025
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
32X22 CM
CONTACT info@pai32.com FOR PRICE REQUEST
This series of watercolor portraits is based on brief encounters with strangers in the underground. Observing their faces and expressions, I write textual descriptions that become the basis for AI-generated portraits. I then transform these images using digital graphics and collage and recreate them in watercolor. The resulting works are layered images that exist between memory and imagination, observation and interpretation. This is my way of rethinking the watercolor portrait and capturing the impressions that remain after these fleeting meetings.
DOT ALS @dot_als_
ARCHITECTURES INFLUX
170X135X70CM
INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION
NFS
Architectures Influx is an interactive installation where a screen, a re-interpreted streetlight unit, and a microphone pole form a responsive system continually fed by its environment. Ambient light in the room modulates illumination in real time inside a 3D architectural scene, while simultaneously brightening or dimming the physical light unit. Ambient sound, such as passing cars, footsteps, or voices, sets the velocity of the virtual camera, echoing the way urban surveillance increasingly reacts to their surroundings. The visual language draws on contemporary architecture materials and aesthetics, integrated into an
animated piece that never settles.
JUDY MAXWELL-MCNICOL @weemoodyjudy
THE SECOND COMING OF ANN LEE
115 X 100 X 190 CM
CONTACT info@pai32.com FOR PRICE REQUEST
There once was a lady, Ann Lee,
Who proclaimed, “I’m the vessel – God speaks through me!”
So she rocked in her chair,
Sat on hands clasped in prayer,
And cried, “Oh sweet ecstasy, the Lord will set you free!”
With eyes rolling back in delight,
She trembled in rapture-born light.
Those hands pressed just so,
The spirit moved rhythmically below
She swore it was a pure, sacred rite.
Her followers grew – gathered with awe and devotion.
She spoke in tongues with each rocking motion.
They’d whisper, “Oh Mother, you’re sacred, you’re pure!”
“Through your holy water, salvation is sure!”
The second coming of Christ, betwixt her thighs,
Her followers knelt, entranced by her sighs.
Blessed by Saint Sebald, she rocked and prayed,
Then something odd happened, she became unmade.
A shimmer, a glow, and a soft little hiss,
As Ann Lee, dear Mother, was transformed by bliss.
She emerged as a snail, with a shell on her back,
Her holy water now a divine, slimy track.
“God bless Mother!” they cried, with reverence anew,
As she slid through the temple, leaving a trail of God’s truth.
“She’s eternal, she’s wise, in her shell we find grace;
For Ann Lee, the snail transcends all human race.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Lee
VI KALINSKI @vikalinski
BECAME A BAT IN MY OWN HOUSE
DIGITAL PAINTING PRINT, SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC PAINT, OIL PASTELS, PENS,
CRAYONS ON STRETCHED CANVAS
CONTACT info@pai32.com FOR PRICE REQUEST
This painting is part of a series and project Isolation Journal. Urban situations and loneliness under oppression, and
anonymity becoming isolation. These interrogate how capitalist, neoliberal cities dehumanise their inhabitants while
hiding the violence they sustain elsewhere. Exploring the architecture of isolation, trauma, and resistance through art and theory. Originally created as an abstract space in a digital painting form then to be printed on canvas and allow direct, by hand intervention, creating a differential space and final landscape.
BILL WANG HAIBIAO @wangyi_bill
HAVE YOU HEARD OF HER HERE?
173X40X63CM
POLYESTER, EMULSIFIED OIL, ACTIVATED CARBON, GAUZE FIBER, CHINESE LACQUER, SOIL, STAINLESS STEEL
CONTACT info@pai32.com FOR PRICE REQUEST
My work often features strange, lifelike objects with moist, glossy skin surfaces and musculature-like organic features, often accompanied by an organic, emulsified, oily, liquid environment. In the work “Do You Know Her?”, I focus on Morgellons fibrosis, a fibrosis not recognised by authorities, which is one of the reasons it piqued my interest. She is both real and invisible. She is skin-like, fragile, and exposed. This alien substance, seemingly emerging from a gestational shell, evokes associations of restriction, coercion, and unease. Rigidity and fluidity, oppression and desire, flesh and shell, instinct and violence are condensed into a multifaceted whole.
DANIEL WIDRIG @danielwidrig
NEGATIVE, 2025
3D PRINTED UV RESIN, SPRAYPAINTED
120CM X 3CM X 120CM
CONTACT info@pai32.com FOR PRICE REQUEST
Negative belongs to a series of reliefs that map the city’s surfaces, capturing its scratches and graffiti marks. These urban traces are digitized and reimagined through processes of digital translation. In this work, the artist assumes the role of scavenger, navigating the city to gather and reinterpret fragments of its material and cultural remains, transforming the residue of the urban landscape into sculptural form.
KIRILL BASALAEV @kirill.basalaev.art
ALIMENTATION, 2025
H47XL28XW29CM
CEMENT, FILLER, SAND, EPOXY RESIN, METAL WIRE
CONTACT info@pai32.com FOR PRICE REQUEST
Suspended between formation and collapse, this biomorphic cement form evokes a body that might have been born yet remains incomplete. Neither human nor animal, it emerges from the collision between material and memory. Fractures, weight, and imperfections become traces of experience – an imprint of something that once aspired to become alive. The work resists representation, instead embodying the tension between the corporeal and the nonhuman, between becoming and decay.
MASHAI @mashai_art
HUNTER, 2016-25
METALL, GLOSS, OIL, D35 CM
CONTACT info@pai32.com FOR PRICE REQUEST
What we call concepts—of self, object, chimera, illusion—are merely interpretive labels affixed to material substrates, necessarily contingent and ultimately unstable. Objective reality, as such, is unknowable. A circular, found-metal panel has been enamelled to a high gloss and ringed with jagged, gear-like teeth. At its centre, a gold silhouette—rendered in the language of Greek black-figure pottery—shows a lithe hunter in a petasos-style hat, one arm braced on a spear, the other drawing a patterned cloak that reads as pelt. The classical motif sits on an industrial substrate pocked with drill holes and rust, collapsing museum antiquity into roadside detritus. The work stages a witty tension between permanence and scrap, suggesting how images circulate, erode, and are continuously remade across cultures and materials.
LOCATION: PURIST Gallery, 114 King’s Cross Rd, London WC1X 9DS
PAI_32 platform 