ABOUT
UPCOMING
EDITIONS
FROM 6 TO 9
Hafsa Siddiqui
June 26th - Aug 10th
Siddiqui’s material language is modest but deliberate: chicken wire, cardboard, foil, plaster sheets, and a single coat of paint. Her studio resembles an A&E ward, strewn with bandage-like wrappings and gestures of care. When she drapes plaster sheets over wire skeletons, the act feels less like construction than tending to invisible wounds, or perhaps opening new ones. The sculptures are hollow, their porousness revealing inner absences: gaps in the paint allow the viewer to glimpse inside, as though witnessing a wound never fully closed. The materials are cheap, flexible, and “very forgiving,” as the artist puts it, allowing for reshaping, dismantling, and improvisation.
These figures are storytellers without dialogue. Siddiqui always begins with the head, its shape, its expression, and lets the body follow, building intuitively downward through the torso and limbs. Postures emerge, and the environment completes them. Anne, Raj, Gilbert, and Rebecca are restrained from language, stripped of everything but their bodies and presence, trying to figure out how to live together. They brim with unspoken weight, emotions that leak out silently. They feel charged with non-verbal stories: the kind that fester quietly behind closed doors.
That leakage becomes Resentment, a long, stuffed, snake-like form that winds its way through space. Unlike the hollow human figures, the serpent is dense, bloated with implication. It is at once pet and parasite, comfort and threat. A rupture in Siddiqui’s sculptural grammar, Resentment suggests accumulation, something lurking, unexpressed, perhaps even inherited.
The gallery becomes a soft theatre of impasse, populated by characters bloated with small fears, compromises, and sadness, holding a zone for quiet psychological rupture. Nothing happens, and yet something is always on the verge. Unanchored and unresolved, they linger in a suspended emotional present.
This atmosphere doesn’t exist in isolation. It resonates with a broader generational mood. Younger generations report higher levels of anxiety, burnout, and emotional exhaustion. Economic precarity, climate dread, digital overexposure, and political disillusionment have all contributed to a pervasive sense of affective fatigue. In this context, resentment becomes not only interpersonal, but systemic. Resentment becomes a social effect.
In Confucian thought, resentment signals a social fracture: outward harmony masking inner corrosion. In psychoanalysis, it is an effect born of repression, an unprocessed debt between selves. In Siddiqui’s world, Resentment takes shape as a soft, awkward creature: too big to ignore, too familiar to disown.
Are we anticipating rupture, or living in its aftermath? This is a site of emotional backlog, where words have taken too long to digest and silence begins to ferment.
Jéssica Varrichio
London
June, 2025