Revisiting “Imaginary Possessions”: A Conversation at the Warburg Institute

Sarah Vidalin returns to the exhibition through a discussion with its artists and curator.

Artists Gabriel Campbell and Sebastian Alabaster in conversation with curator Mei Bassett-Chen and Olivia Rössler at the Warburg Institute. Photograph by Immer Salvador.

Last Friday evening, following Morisot’s exhibition Imaginary Possessions, artists Sebastien Alabaster and Gabriel Campbell joined Mei Bassett-Chen, co-owner of Morisot and curator of Imaginary Possessions, and Olivia Rössler, president of the Courtauld Contemporary Art Practice Society, for an hour-long discussion held at the Warburg Institute. The event opened with Rössler interviewing the artists about their respective practices and preoccupations. Bassett-Chen then led a discussion of the exhibition itself, considering how Greatorex Street’s gallery space engaged with the works, the installation process, and the collective curatorial vision for the show.

At the Warburg, Rössler opened the discussion by asking each artist to describe their medium and sources of inspiration. Campbell explained that, since 2024, his practice has focused on the relationship between printmaking and oil painting. His oil paintings demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of colour theory and saturation. Shown in the triptych Follow, where he worked exclusively with four pigments: yellow ochre, Prussian blue, burnt sienna, and white. His printmaking similarly adopts painterly techniques. Discussing his dodecaptych On Possession’ s, Rössler highlighted Campbell’s process of transforming found photographs through etching and aquatint on somerset paper before dividing the image into twelve panels and reworking it with oil paint. The work, based on a friend’s photograph taken in Afghanistan in the 1960s, recontextualises an archival image through contemporary intervention. Campbell explained that he deliberately works with photographs that are not his own, believing that found images preserve another person’s existence and photographic intention without introducing the personal bias of his own memories. For him, archival photographs continually possess a permanence that can be reimagined, allowing the past and present to coexist within a single work. Meanwhile, Alabaster’s practice spans acrylic painting on stretched canvas as well as video and installation, although only the former was exhibited in Imaginary Possessions. Drawing on theoretical texts such as M. Gee’s Art Criticism since 1900 alongside artists including J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Mark Rothko, and Frank Bowling, his practice engages with philosophical interpretations of the sublime. Rössler discussed Alabaster’s Untitled, a last-minute addition to the May exhibition, through this lens. Expanding on ideas discussed in my previous review of the exhibition, Alabaster described the contemporary sublime as an inherently negative experience, one of despair that he seeks to evoke in his work. His process reflects this pursuit. Using layers of acrylic dripped onto raw stretched canvas, which he then hoses down in his father’s back garden, Alabaster embraces chance as a means of producing what he describes as “honest pieces.” Even so, many of these unpredictable attempts are discarded when their final outcomes fail to meet his desired standards. As he explained, “when you try to control too much it becomes something it's not meant to be (...) I understand the feeling of what I want to create as opposed to specific aesthetics.” This emphasises how Alabaster’s practice is highly driven by emotion and intuition, as opposed to intentional rendering. In addition to his paint-on-canvas process, Alabaster briefly addressed a more deliberate aspect of his practice: his use of stretched canvas. He explained that this enables him to play with negative space, thereby liberating the work from being perceived as a self-contained object. Together, the stretched canvas, traces of emotions and physical labour, and large scale of his finished works reinforce his engagement with the sublime.

In the second half of the discussion, Bassett-Chen took over as chair to discuss the exhibition itself. Discussing the show’s title, Imaginary Possessions, was interpreted by Morisot as the inability to control or own images. There was a recurring theme of purposeful degradation, visualised in Campbell’s re-authoring of found photographs and Alabaster roughly rendered canvases. The discussion highlighted the exhibition’s political undertones, as ideas of war and conflict manifested literally through abstraction. As Basset-Chen explained, the exhibition deliberately brought together works that are intentionally different, but derive from shared intellectual interests developed through the artists’ friendship and shared studio space. The principal curatorial aim was to derive meaning from this aesthetic contrast between Campbell and Alabaster’s artworks.

Although Imaginary Possessions originated as an artist-led project, Bassett-Chen played a crucial role in shaping its final presentation. While the selection of the nine exhibited works remained with Campbell and Alabaster, she was primarily responsible for their thematic alignment and installation. During the talk, she presented a scale styrofoam model of the Greatorex Street gallery, which she had constructed todetermine the placement of each work before installation day. Given that the team had only a single day to install the exhibition, this planning proved essential, affording the team extra time to navigate and overcome any potential hurdles. For instance, both artists make their own frames, meaning that the wooden backings are not always straight or equally flat. This made hanging some of them a challenge. Furthermore, the gallery's industrial architecture, including raw concrete and faded red painted concrete flooring, ultimately complemented the exhibition, particularly by enhancing the muted colour palette of several works. Although Campbell attributed this harmony to chance,Bassett-Chen's careful installation planning suggests it was as much the product of considered curatorial intervention as of serendipity.

The collaboration between the artists and the curator emerged as one of the exhibitions defining strengths. Alabaster explained that curation matters deeply to him as an artist. He believes that exhibitions of living artists, particularly for emerging practitioners like himself, should be developed through an ongoing dialogue between artist and curator, allowing the artist’s ideas to be thoughtfully communicated and incorporated. What began as a group of friends has now become a thriving trifecta taking a stab at London’s emerging art scene. Imaginary Possessions lived on at the Warburg last Friday night, where the discussion offered a more in-depth analysis of the exhibition and demonstrated the strength of this newly formed collective.