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?