East Wing Biennial 16: A Call for RE:VISION

Natasha Phillips-Geen

Kelly Wu, Here You Are, Grandmother’s English notes, pet bed, 2024. Photo: courtesy of The East Wing Biennial Committee

For its 16th edition, the East Wing Biennial has been directed and curated respectively by third year undergraduates Romy Brill-Allen and Madeline Cheeseman. Titled RE:VISION, it stakes a claim to bring together ‘a selection of contemporary artists who aim to avoid the pitfalls of history by remembering without repeating.’ [East Wing Biennial Central to the exhibition itself is a spirit of plurality, reflection, and destabilisation. 

It comes at a time when The Courtauld itself is in transition and flux. Physically, it is split across two sites (with the exhibition taking place at Vernon Square while major renovation works continue at Somerset House). Whilst institutionally, it is not immune to the wider pressures of funding, freedom of speech, AI, and questions of inclusivity and access that have characterised a period of uncertainty and change for the higher education institutions of today. 

First developed in 1991 by then-Courtauld student Joshua Compton, the East Wing Biennial emerged from a desire to update the bare walls of the university’s East Wing at Somerset House, which served as the building’s primary teaching space, with a showcase of works by living artists. From this initial project, it has grown into a biannual exhibition, curated and led entirely by students, bringing contemporary art into the spaces where students spend most of their time during their Courtauld years. 

It feels fitting then that this edition of the East Wing Biennial is also accompanied by the 2025 East Wing Biennial Archive Project, which both preserves the previously largely undocumented curatorial process and draws together archival material to encourage reflection on past Biennials.  

Given another of the exhibition’s ambitious aims, highlighted in its introduction, to remind us that ‘history is not static, but a dynamic force,’ it is unsurprising that the works span such a broad and varied range of touchpoints. At the exhibition’s opening night I watched Jeremy Deller’s subversion of English nationalism and culture in English Magic, saw Maria Gvardeitseva’s performance piece Men in Suits, and listened to Simon Fisher Turner’s site-specific installation The Staircase in King’s Cross; all interspersed between Camilla Ridger’s collaboration with a Generative Adversarial Network in her painting In Between Subjects: ii, and Hanski’s (Hannah Epstein) satirical wool-tufted rug depicting a figure in red high-heeled boots, smoking a cigarette with a speech bubble bearing the work’s title, Sub Elite. 

While its curatorial ambition and breadth seem apt for a cultural moment marked by interminable upheaval and uneasy inflection, it is within the smaller subcategories that the exhibition finds its direction, offering deftly conceived miniature displays that provide the specificity needed for the most powerful artistic conversations. From the broader ideals of RE:VISION, twelve subthemes emerge, all with the prefix RE. 

Seminar Room 3 centres on RE:ASSERT, which focuses on the power of affirming, or in some cases retracting, self-identity and individuality through multiplicities and inconsistencies of media. In her thoughtful essay accompanying the room, Maria Cicala, who leads the East Wing’s Archival Project and serves as Head of Publicity and Communications for the exhibition, draws on French Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant’s assertion of opacity as a force that destabilises hierarchical and imperial norms. Here, opacity provides a shelter where diversity and individuality can exist capaciously. This redefining of opacity is then cleverly used as a springboard to explore the six works in the room. 

Two works in the room are by photographer Jimmi Wing Ka Ho, who bases himself between Hong Kong and the UK. The more interactive of the two is a slide projector installation, Here You Are, which when clicked reveals a sequence of cityscapes that shift between the real and the imaginary. Wing refuses to assign a fixed identity to a city that colonial forces seek to define. Instead, we are invited to flicker between multiple iterations and visual interpretations. Clarity and objectivity in the urban environment are denied as the colonial city becomes obscured and fragmented. Following Glissant’s thought, the dominant colonial narrative is replaced with a powerful cloak of opacity as we struggle to decipher the fictitious from the genuine in each slide. 

On the adjacent wall, Mamu Unu’s photographic print Social Contract engages with the theme of opacity more overtly. Three cast figures, bride, groom and officiant, occupy the central space of the image, indicated only by their clothing. Their defining features of individuality, with the exception of the bride’s upturned smile, are denied to us. The background, which would normally provide essential context and help the viewer form cultural assumptions about the subjects, is also obscured, leaving a void of negative space. The majority of the narrative scene is concealed in literal blackness, from which only the outward social indicators surface. The narrative, personal elements of what is supposed to be an intimate photograph are protected. 

Mamu Unu, Social Contract, Photography print, 2022. Photo: courtesy of The East Wing Biennial Committee

Kelly Wu’s work Here You Are displays a tender intimacy between grandmother and granddaughter. Its sense of opacity is immediate. The handwritten note at the centre of the composition shifts between Mandarin and English, so the full significance of the note is not immediately clear, not only to many viewers but also to Wu, who is verbally fluent but illiterate in Mandarin. What was intended as a touchpoint between different generations and languages is framed in a sage-green animal bed, rendering its original purpose void and its personal significance unclear. 

We are offered a warning against grand narratives and categorisation. Our power of looking and knowing is tested, as we are invited to engage with personal accounts of self-expression and identity, only to realise that we are only given fragments and partial perspectives. RE:ASSERT charts a private, reserved course that straddles the stated and unstated, the visible and the invisible. The curatorial strategy of privileging fragments and partial perspectives challenges the viewer’s desire for completeness and is one that is both successful and frustratingly alluring. 

Pipilotti Rist’s two photo stills, courtesy of Hauser and Wirth, are the highlight of RE:FORM in Seminar Room 4, successfully embodying the importance of multiplicity and evolution that any worthy revision should insist upon. Her primary practices in video and installation seem to inform the works on display. The two stills resist their static condition as photographs. Rather than using photographic stillness to suggest permanence, they strain toward movement. In Untitled 14, instead of directing our attention to the formal qualities of the clasped hands, the photograph draws us to colour, blurred motion, and the abstract patterns that emerge through the close-up nature of the composition. The physical form of the hand constantly shifts and revises itself, not through literal motion, but through perceptual shifts and mental leaps of the mind that occur when Rist collapses the ordinary separation of form in photographic convention and prioritises a fluidity of matter. 

Like Rist’s stills, which refuse the convention of treating a printed image as a fixed endpoint and instead use it as a device to explore divergent visual qualities and perspectives while destabilising the formal subject, the exhibition prioritises multiplicity and interpretation over the supremacy of a historical endpoint. In calling for a revision, the exhibition cleverly links to its two-year lifespan, highlighting not only its purpose in offering a corrective history but also one of expansion and proliferation. Its meaning will undoubtedly change through its exposure to the rhythms of the Courtauld's daily comings and goings, resisting a finality that cannot truly be assessed on an opening night. We are left to ponder what its impact might be.