júlia mazzoni

In February 2024, there was an open call for an artist residency in Camberwell Space. I co-created with Xuan Hew, a fellow MA Painting colleague, a collaborative project for it, aiming to create a dialogue between our practices through the lens of perception/stillness. Unfortunately, our project was not selected. However, in April 2024, Xuan got the opportunity to book the Peckham Levels exhibition space for her own project and invited me to curate her solo show there. I decided then to reorganize our previous project as the curatorial project for her exhibition.

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Moments of Stillness opened on May 8th, and ran through May 7th to May 11th of 2024. The exhibition was composed of Xuan's work, alongside images of her sketchbook/processes, quotes that are connected to her practice and an interactive piece, to give the audience a free space of self-expression. A lot of the ideas came from the artist herself, such as the quotes on the walls, the interactive piece, postcards, and the playlist that accompanied the exhibition. After presenting her first ideas, we worked together to understand the best ways to materialize them, and that's when the curatiorial work started: in the conversations with the artist.

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The place was divided in two: the exhibition section and the interactive/studio space section. The interactive piece, a blank canvas with the prompt "Write, draw, quote... anything, really" aimed to open space and dialogue with the community as they could express themselves freely, hoping to make them feel as they are a part of the exhibition as well. This section, alongside a table with prompts for reflection and other possibilities of free writing/drawing, was composed with prints of the artist's sketchbook on the wall, evoking the feeling of an open/in process room.

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Just as the mountains occupy many spaces (the horizon line, the surroundings, the land and the sky), we've tried to play with different heights for the paintings, also utilizing the corners of the room, to explore this idea of the nature present everywhere. The exhibition starts with Xuan's most distinctive piece, a painting of a piece of wood that she collected through her walkings in parks of London. She starts from the point that she is now, opening space for the collected landscapes from other parts of the world to come together.

 

Her lived and imagined experiences, the desire for connection to a climate that is different from the one present in her home, marks the rest of the works in the space. The paintings evoke time, presence and memory. With the aim of being a place to pause and breathe, and considering the artist's own experience of observing nature for a long period of time, as a reflective practice, we placed a bench in the middle of it so that people could spend as much time as they wanted looking at the paintings.​

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The exhibition turned out to be the essence of Xuan's personality as a human being and as an artist. It's a piece of her journey as an artist that came to London to explore new perspectives of her work and of life.