Rebuild Babel explores communication through the language of artworks and has lots to say about the world today

by Alastair JR Ball

To enter Rebuild Babel is to step into a field of competing tongues: mechanical, edible, sculptural, whispered. One does not encounter a thesis. One encounters a condition. The exhibition, organised by curatorial team Green Grammar, takes as its point of departure the biblical parable of Babel, the proliferation of languages as both punishment and possibility, but refuses to dramatise it as catastrophe. Instead, confusion becomes atmosphere. Meaning circulates. Noise acquires density.

The curators, Moyu Yang and Chang Wang, cite Cildo Meireles’ Babel as an inspiration, a work in which radios broadcast in multiple languages, producing an engulfing simultaneity. In Rebuild Babel, this simultaneity is transposed into matter. Communication is not only spoken or written; it is tasted, handled, endured. The exhibition’s logic is less linguistic than metabolic. Information becomes something one consumes, mis-digests, excretes. The gallery becomes a body.

Biblical aesthetics

Biblical aesthetics thread through the space with a curious restraint. Bread recurs in sculptures by Moyu Yang and Zhen Zhen, humble, sacramental, a substance at once quotidian and charged. In Christian iconography it is both nourishment and body. Here, it appears without piety. It is pressed into artworks that feel devotional without sermonising. The sacred lingers as residue. One senses the afterimage of scripture, photocopied too many times, its authority softened into texture.

Co-curator Chang Wang said: “For us, language is not only spoken or written. Especially in our exhibitions, communication often happens through multimedia, materials, the body and the senses.” Co-curator Moyu Yang added: “Each artist uses their own artistic language - such as performance and installation - to express their ideas.”

Yet if the exhibition evokes Babel, it is equally concerned with the market. Language is not only a divine gift; it is traded, hoarded, manipulated. The curators insist they did not set out to construct an exhibition about economics. Yet, as so often happens, the material realities of artists’ lives have seeped into the work. Themes of resource extraction, labour automation, and commodified history recur not as slogans but as shared anxieties.

Orbit of Obedience

Louise Wan’s kinetic installation, Orbit of Obedience, stages control as choreography. A circle of balls hovers, each buoyed by hidden fans, some obediently moving, others stubbornly inert. A plastic barrier constrains their trajectories, ensuring that nothing strays too far from the prescribed orbit. Wan said: “This piece is about every individual under their own struggle, but they’re all in a circle as a collective, just like how society works.”

The work literalises power as air pressure, an invisible force that animates and restricts. One is reminded that collectively is never innocent. We communicate in order to form a social body, Wan suggests, yet that body is structured by constraints. The piece’s repetitive motion becomes an image of contemporary life: individual struggles arranged within systemic patterns.

Mechanical tongues lick ice cream they cannot taste

Her companion work, Mouthless, is more grotesque and more tender. Mechanical tongues lick ice cream they cannot taste. The sweetness melts, spills, and must be cleaned by human hands. Automation promises efficiency; it delivers dependency. “There are a lot of automation nowadays… but I feel like actually most of those automated machines cannot really help us from reducing our workflow … the self checkout machine, it always needs people to look after it,” Wan said.

The tongues’ in her artwork futile tasting becomes an allegory of commodified desire: consumption without satisfaction. In the biblical register of the exhibition, it is a parody of manna, food that never nourishes.

What is striking is how these works approach language through the senses. Wan speaks of “tasting” as a mode of communication. Here, speech is displaced into gesture, into repetitive action. The failure of language becomes productive. If Babel is the story of linguistic fragmentation, Rebuild Babel asks whether meaning might arise elsewhere: in rhythm, in touch, in the stubborn materiality of ice cream melting on the floor. “It might seem to be something not using language… so we try to speak through the senses of like tasting,” Wan said.

Clay becomes a language

Lily Ye Zhang’s ceramics offer another inflection. Working with porcelain and red clay, she engages the earth as both resource and interlocutor. Clay becomes a language, one she speaks through shaping, remaking, firing. Her ceramics forms evoke natural growth yet remain unmistakably crafted. They suggest that interpretation itself is a form of extraction: we read the world, we harvest it for meaning.

Zhang’s biography, Uyghur Chinese and Canadian English, suspended between geographies, haunts the work quietly. She speaks of geography, of natural resources, of cultures mingling like cuisines. In a show preoccupied with Babel, her position between languages acquires symbolic force. The loss of her mother tongue is not dramatised, yet it shadows the ceramics. Each vessel becomes a container for what cannot be fully retrieved. The biblical theme of building and rebuilding acquires a geopolitical resonance. Towers rise; languages erode.

The fabrication of history

Another thread in the exhibition concerns the fabrication of history. Fake antiques appear as sly commentaries on authenticity. Once language loses its anchor, the past becomes a style to be replicated. In an economy of images, antiquity can be manufactured. The sacred becomes décor. This gesture aligns with the show’s broader suspicion of stable meaning. If bread can be both sacrament and commodity, if clay can be both earth and product, then history itself is porous.

The curators frame miscommunication not as failure but as generative gap. Yang said: “Sometimes this is not a failure of communication. It is part of how artworks work, meaning is produced through the encounter between the work and the viewer.”

Cities dense with linguistic exchange

In the context of Rebuild Babel, it acquires urgency. The exhibition was staged in London and Berlin, cities dense with linguistic exchange. Babel here is not mythic ruin but daily reality. Multiple voices coexist, overlap, misunderstand.

The question is not how to restore a single language but how to inhabit plurality without violence. “Many different voices, materials and artistic languages exist together, trying to understand one another,” Wang said.

One might ask whether the biblical framework risks aestheticising crisis. Babel, after all, is a story about divine intervention halting human ambition. In our moment of ecological and economic precarity, the tower feels less like hubris than survival strategy. Yet the exhibition avoids apocalyptic rhetoric. It does not scream about collapse. It allows confusion to accumulate. The works sit with contradiction: collective power and incomplete circuitry, as Roman Vaughan-Williams’s imagined tower of society suggests.

Communication is always entangled with power

What lingers after leaving Rebuild Babel is less a set of arguments than a sensation of expanded perception. The exhibition refuses the comfort of clear translation. It stages language as labour, as appetite, as resource. It suggests that communication is always entangled with power, economic, cultural, theological.

If there is a rebuke embedded in the show, it is directed at the fantasy of frictionless exchange. In the market, in the supermarket self-checkout, in the digital interface, we are promised seamlessness. Wan’s melting ice cream and humming machines expose the maintenance required to sustain that illusion. Zhang’s clay insists on the slow time of the earth beneath our transactions. Bread reappears as a reminder that sustenance is communal, fragile.

Rebuild Babel is mind-expanding not because it offers grand revelation, but because it destabilises the ground on which revelation might occur. It asks whether rebuilding means repair or reconfiguration. Perhaps Babel cannot be fixed. Perhaps it can only be inhabited, cracks and all. In that habitation lies a modest hope: that from miscommunication might arise not unity, but a more attentive form of listening.

Rebuild Babel was at art'otel London Hoxton.

Photography: Green Grammar.

Below are the details of everyone involved in the exhibition.

Artists

Jing Hsu, Kuba Stepien, Rory Bakker-Marshall, Louise Wan, Roman Vaughan-Williams, Tianhui Tao, Xiaoze Zhang, Luna Meng, Samuel Colley-Hunt, Ben Grosse-Johannboecke, Benjamin Tong, Xirong Gui, Xiaohan Luo, Xinyi Xu, Yuchen Wu, Rockforth Datuin, Carolin Meyer, Yihao Zhang, Lily Ye Zhang, Xinyu Gao, Moyu Yang, Zhen Zhen

Curators

Moyu Yang, Chang Wang

Nothing Holds On Its Own: social architecture and how we all live together

By Alastair JR Ball

The air inside Nothing Holds On Its Own feels charged, not with spectacle, but with proximity. You sense it before you name it: the press of breath, the small, accidental symmetries between strangers, the hush that falls when a performance begins and you realise, with an odd tenderness, that you are part of the work simply by being there.

Green Grammar’s latest exhibition is less a show than an experiment in being-with, a curatorial attempt to trace what Marguerite Duras once called “the web of our existence,” where nothing, and no one, ever stands alone.

In a cultural moment obsessed with individuality, the personal brand, the solo genius, the algorithmic feed tailored to your exquisite uniqueness, Nothing Holds On Its Own feels almost insurgent. It insists that we are porous, symbiotic, and reliant. That love, care, and attention are not private emotions but social architectures, invisible yet load-bearing.

Wider ecology of connections

The exhibition takes Duras’s La Vie matérielle as its touchstone, but where Duras found poetry in domestic entanglement, Green Grammar extends her logic into the wider ecology of connection: between people, materials, memories, and the ghosts of the digital age.

The gallery itself, a minimalist open space in the brutalist shadow of Metro Central Heights in Elfant and Castle, becomes a testing ground for intimacy. The curators, Moyu Yang and Chang Wang, who together are Green Grammar, have gathered a constellation of artists from across cultures and generations, creating a dialogue that feels less like a hierarchy than a gathering.

One of the most quietly devastating works is by Xinyuan Yan. In a darkened corner, she projects faint, pixelated images of her late grandmother, found, hauntingly, on the Chinese equivalent of Google Maps, onto the gallery wall. The images flicker between domestic banality and spectral revelation: a woman caught mid-step, frozen forever in algorithmic purgatory.

Between love and surveillance

It’s a work that sits between love and surveillance, grief and data. In an era when every loss is archived, Yan’s gesture asks what remains of intimacy once it’s been mediated by the machine. And yet, watching the audience gather, whispering softly to one another, it became clear that the projection had done something extraordinary: it had summoned a collective act of remembrance.

Nearby, Georgia Salmond’s sculptures anchor the exhibition in something bodily. A London-based artist known for her mould-making and life-casting, Salmond’s practice sits squarely within the uncanny. Her work here included masks of faces separate from bodies, gazing up from the floor with empty eyes.

At first glance, they resemble death masks from an ancient grave; look closer and the seams, pores, and air bubbles betray their contemporary origins. They are eerie but tender: a taxonomy of touch that collapses the distance between maker and made. In Salmond’s hands, the psychoanalytic becomes social. The unconscious, it turns out, has fingerprints.

Like the Great River

Then there’s the story that seemed to ripple through the opening night: the retired farmer from rural China, discovered by the curators after her daughter-in-law posted her embroidery online. Unable to read or write, she began “drawing” with thread after moving to the city, using discarded fabric to recreate the valley where she was born.

Her piece, Like the Great River, is a meditation on displacement and resilience, art made not for recognition, but survival. Standing before it, surrounded by Londoners from every conceivable background, you could feel the word “authentic” reclaiming its meaning. Not as an aesthetic category, but as an act of truth-telling.

What makes Nothing Holds On Its Own remarkable isn’t simply its sincerity, but its refusal to separate the art from the atmosphere. During Kairi Tokoro’s performance, a fluid musical composition played on the artist’s object-sculpture, I looked around the room and saw a diverse group of people all captivated, united in a mutual love of art.

Communal presence

This sense of communal presence runs throughout Green Grammar’s curatorial ethos. It’s the latest iteration of their ongoing interest in human connection, roots and our environment. It’s not a sterile, theory-heavy, contemporary art exhibition, but in a deeply personal, embodied.

They understand love not as muse but as methodology. For them, curating is a form of care work: connecting artists across continents, creating spaces where vulnerability is shared rather than performed.

At a time when so much contemporary art is preoccupied with irony or market logic, Nothing Holds On Its Own risks sincerity, and in doing so, feels radical. It argues that art’s most urgent function is not to innovate or provoke, but to remind us that we exist through one another. That in the midst of ecological collapse, political polarisation, and digital alienation, interdependence is not weakness but survival.

Loves becomes infrastructure

Leaving the Annex that evening, I found myself lingering at the threshold, watching as people hugged, exchanged numbers, and promised to meet again. The exhibition had done what few manage: it had made art feel like a form of collective respiration.

Love, in all its awkward, improvised forms, had become infrastructure once more. And for a moment, in that shared exhale, the city itself felt less lonely.

Roots of Roots: Making the buried visible

By Alastair JR Ball

The first thing I noticed at Roots of Roots at Filet wasn’t an artwork. It was the height of the floor. Or rather, how close some of the works demanded you get to it. Clay. Hair. Driftwood. Soil. The show begins low, insistently. Not with spectacle, but with sediment. It makes you crouch, peer down, recalibrate the angle of encounter.

This is a show about roots, and it asks you to start from below.

Curated by Chang Wang and Moyu Yang, Roots of Roots gathers a group of 50/50 Chinese and Western artists all working in London. Roots here are not worn as cultural markers or motifs. They are questions. How do we grow downward as well as forward? What does it mean to be rooted in a place you weren’t born in, or in a culture that never quite claimed you? What happens to roots when you keep moving?

One of the first pieces I was struck by was Georgia Salmond’s Ivy, which uses casts of ivy that had enveloped a tree to explore ideas of femininity. Her praxis uses the biological structure of plants and instantly brought ideas of how roots are essential to the natural world to mind. Placing this artwork in relation to artworks by Chinese artists made me think about the many different meanings of the word root and how they are all connected: grounding us, stabilising us, feeding us.

Sediment and storytelling

I began with Xiang Li’s To Root and Bloom, a sculpture placed directly on the floor, as if it had always belonged there. Plant fibres, human hair, clay. It radiated a kind of quiet insistence: soft, but unignorable. The work comes from an in-between space not resolution, but adaptation. The kind of root that doesn’t grip with force, but by staying, again and again.

Nearby, Sarah Fortais’ Lark leaned into London’s detritus: animal bones from the Thames, jackfruit skins, soil from the city’s edges. Bones, she writes, still marked with butchery from Smithfield Market. Jackfruit, both exoticised and consumed. In this stellated dodecahedron, nothing is native, but everything is absorbed. Here, roots are composite: historical, edible, necrotic, hybrid. I thought of compost. Of London as a digestive system.

Then there was Yihao Zhang’s Unlanded. Driftwood hung with fibrous cords, gently motorised, reaching downward but never quite making contact. Migration not as movement from A to B, but as a condition of suspended searching. The wood was heavy. The roots were light. The piece vibrated with longing, the kind that doesn’t resolve, only repeats.

Up on the wall, Xinyi Liu’s Elegy offered silver-plate images of fading flowers and dusk light. A reclamation of grief, in a culture that often hides it. Liu’s work asked: can nature help us face what we’ve learned to forget? In her hands, roots became metaphor: for loss, for tradition, for the unspoken.

Across the space, Jingtang Wang’s birch tree sculpture, its trunk bitten with dental moulds, refused easy metaphors. Roots were not the focus here; the tree was already altered. Bark like skin, eyes, scars. A witness to intervention. It made me think of orthodontics, urban planning, language acquisition. The ways we “straighten” ourselves to fit.

Toward the living trace

It was the performance piece that held me longest. “Undone” performed by Siyuan Meng and Fruzsina Nagy, with choreography by Meng and music by Christopher Rodriguez, unfolded slowly inside the window space. Fragile materials: rice paper, water, salt. The body moved through them like a weather pattern, deliberate, porous, erratic.

We stood still on the street outside the gallery, looking in, watching the performance slowly unfold, held in a kind of quiet suspense. The performance wasn’t theatrical. It was bodily, atmospheric. The paper tore with sound. Salt scattered like memory. Water pooled. What was left: the trace. This was not metaphor. This was rooting itself, slow, sensory, unpredictable.

Watching Meng and Nagy, I felt something shift. All the earlier works, with their fibres and bones and digital hauntings, had prepared me to see the body differently. As a root system. As a site of erosion. As something that remembers where it’s been, even if it no longer knows where it’s going.

Wang and Yang’s curatorial hand was subtle but insistent. The works rhizomed, connecting through association, texture, breath. You weren’t told what to feel. You had to root around for it. It felt less like walking through a gallery, more like falling into a subterranean network.

Roots of Roots is not a nostalgic show. It doesn’t mourn disconnection or celebrate belonging. It dwells in the liminal: where roots are gestures, not guarantees. It reminds us that we depend on what lies beneath, nutrients, memory, history, grief, and yet we rarely see it. These artists make the buried visible. Not as spectacle. As survival.

As I left the gallery, I found myself looking at the pavement differently. Wondering what ran under it. Wondering what still does.

Photography by Gehena Ye

Symbiotic Epidermis: Skin, species, and the trouble with being human

By Alastair JR Ball

The first thing I noticed at Symbiotic Epidermis at Hypha Studios, before the striking visuals, before the whispering canvases and fleshy things rendered in paint, was the skin. Or rather, the obsession with its limits. Skin as border, as threshold. Skin as the ancient, tired metaphor for where "I" end and "you" begin. 

It’s the title’s epidermis, of course, that gives us the clue: not surface, but symptom. The group show, curated by John Angel Rodriguez, is not so much about transhumanism as it is about what we might need to shed, philosophically, emotionally, biologically, if we are to survive what’s coming next.

The base of our intellectual towers

We live, still, in the ruins of humanism. The Renaissance gave us Man (capital M, overwhelmingly white), standing upright in the centre of the cosmos, measure of all things. Modernism inherited his arrogance. Postmodernism deconstructs the above. All our Western intellectual towers are still built on Humanism’s foundations.

Humanism remains the base layer of our civilisational makeup, its values etched deep into our institutions, our law, our language, our machines. Symbiotic Epidermis asks: what if it’s time to evolve? What if we are the skin that must be sloughed?

A rebuke to anthropocentrism

Kamila Sladowska’s work speaks this question in the low frequency of fruits and body parts. Her work - rootlike threads stretching out from a vulva, paintings that could be breasts or fruits, lace containing actual garlic - invites us into a world that mixes nature with the human experience.

This is not nature as a backdrop or resource. It is not Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble green to be rediscovered. It is something older, stranger. A rebuke to the anthropocentrism baked into the Western gaze since the Greeks were carving idealised bodies. Sladowska invites us to remember: we are a part of nature, not separate from it. We were always edible.

Rewriting sympathy in the face of strangeness

Olivia Bloodworth’s paintings are more unnerving. Her world is not a return to nature, but a confrontation with the other, the alien, the unborn, the soon-to-be. Her palette slithers somewhere between H.R. Giger’s biomechanics menace and Francis Bacon’s screaming mouths.

Yet, despite this horror aesthetic, I found myself feeling for her subjects, embryonic, liminal, caught in their not-yet-ness. She made me care about them, even as they unsettled me. That is an artistic coup: to rewire sympathy in the face of strangeness.

This is the real work of transhumanist art. Not to fantasise about uploading our minds into clouds or grafting metal onto skin, but to expand the field of empathy, across species, across futures, across the unrecognisable. The sublime ruin of Bloodworth’s art act like stage curtains for this moral drama: how to look at something unknowable and still say, you matter.

When the category “human” itself feels unstable

Rodriguez’s curation holds these tensions with clarity and bite. There are many other excellent artists in the show. Rodriguez gives us not a roadmap but a mood, one of philosophical vertigo. What do we preserve of humanism in an age when the category “human” itself feels unstable? Can we keep the dignity without the belief in human supremacy over nature? The care without the centrality?

As I left the show, I found myself thinking not about the future of art, but the future of ethics. What kind of values survive ecological collapse? What sort of empathy can stretch far enough to hold not just other people but the post-human, the hybrid, the unloved? Symbiotic Epidermis does not offer answers, but it makes space for the question: when the skin tears, what grows from underneath?