No Permission Necessary: Inside Imaginary Possession
- May 26
- 4 min read
Sarah Vidalin
On Wednesday evening, tucked into an East London side street off Whitechapel Road,
second-year Courtauld BA student Mei Bassett-Chan previewed her first solo-curated
exhibition Imaginary Possession. Presented by Morisot, an organisation co-founded by
Bassett-Chan and one of the exhibitions featured artists, Sebastian Alabaster. In addition to Alabaster, this five-day event also includes artist Gabriel Campbell who studies Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts with Alabaster. As I learned during the preview, Bassett-Chan, Campbell, and Alabaster are more than collaborators sharing similar ambitions; they are close friends who banded together to exhibit their collective debut. Consequently, this show highlights its curator just as much as its artists. It demonstrates how young people can collaborate to produce culture and carve out space for the next generation. Imaginary Possession displays as much initiative as it does talent from both its curator and featured artists, a combination that is increasingly necessary within today’s oversaturated arts job market.
Beyond Bassett-Chan’s personal relationship to the artists, the selected works reveal a
curatorial methodology grounded equally in aesthetic judgement and theoretical research.
Imaginary Possession comprises nine works on canvas and paper: four by Campbell and five by Alabaster. Though formally distinct, both artists engage with historical archives and
fragments to construct unstable narratives of time. Bassett-Chan’s curatorial approach
successfully unites these differing practices by highlighting Campbell and Alabaster’s shared
conceptual attitudes.
After speaking briefly with Bassett-Chan, it became clear to me that the exhibition’s
title translates the logic of her curatorial framework. She explained that Imaginary Possession derives from Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay collection On Photography, which argues that taking and collecting photographs provides individuals with an “imaginary possession of a past that is unreal.” Images transform reality into a commodity, allowing viewers to feel a sense of ownership over places and events they may have never truly experienced themselves.
This notion of photography is especially discernible in Campbell’s four works. In his
oil-on-linen triptych Follow, Campbell draws inspiration from an archival photograph
sourced from what could be a war news article. Across the centre and right-hand panels
stands a row of troops in turquoise uniforms, rigid and attentive, while a principal figure in the foreground wears a similarly tailored tan uniform. The unnerving tension culminates in the left-hand panel, where one of the rendered figures appears to wear an execution hood. Immediately viewers are faced with the disturbing reality of this painting's unsettling subject matter. Hung opposite is another work by Campbell, The Journalist. Though less ominous, the painting similarly engages with the archive of photographic war journalism. Particularly compelling is its metaphysical quality: before a chaotic scene of horses and men stands the back of a solitary figure capturing the spectacle on a flip phone, the screen hovering visibly
above his shoulder. Essentially, Campbell painted the image of a man capturing an image,
therefore, painting a trace of the trace. Here, the notion of possessing perspective is
interrogated; while the figure records the scene before him, the viewer assumes an
omnispective gaze.
Alabaster’s five works likewise critique linear understandings of history. Unlike Campbell, however, Alabaster approaches temporality through materiality and its decay. Working with acrylic on fragmented marouflage cotton duck canvas, he assembles painted sections onto a frame, producing carefully “Frankensteined” surfaces of beige, turquoise/blue, and brown. For Alabaster, time manifests physically through the paint’s gradual transformation: drying, fading, and evolving under environmental conditions such as sunlight. The fragmentation of the canvas itself becomes a symbolic rejection of historical linearity. Bassett-Chan also explained that Alabaster’s practice draws from Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime. In the exhibition’s two largest works, Remnants and Enclave, scale and the contrast between deep blue and pale beige evoke ideas of danger and uncertainty, mirroring a dark storm slowly consuming a bright, open sky. The works therefore become analogous to Burkean terror. The remaining works, called Driftin, Torn, and an untitled painting completed shortly before opening night, invoke more contemporary concepts of the sublime rooted, as the artist explained, in notions of religion and war. In Torn, for example, Alabaster’s application of copper red tones to the stripes of canvas in the upper right and centre left of the composition resembles splatters of blood.
Scattered throughout the gallery and placed in dialogue with one another, the works of Campbell and Alabaster both literally and figuratively disrupt chronological understandings of history. What Bassett-Chan has curated is a collection of artistic chronophagy. Yet the exhibition’s success lies not only in its theoretical sophistication, but also in its relevance to young practitioners. The trio exemplifies what it means to pursue artistic ambition without institutional permission or validation. Rather than waiting for access to established cultural platforms, they have constructed one themselves. Consequently, Imaginary Possession becomes more than an exhibition; it is a statement about contemporary cultural production and the increasing necessity of self-authorship within the arts. As a commercial exhibition, the artists’ engagement with the archive and emotion closely corresponds to Sontag’s notion of imaginary possession. Yet the exhibition also resists passivity: it does not merely reflect contemporary political, philosophical, and social discourses, but actively intervenes in these ideas. In its entirety, Imaginary Possession is intellectually grounded, aesthetically assured, and entirely uninterested in asking for permission.
