ADAM FARAH-SAAD / ELVIS UNIVERSE
04.04.2024 — 25.04.2024
Metroland Studios, 91 Kilburn Vale, London, NW6 6PS
the face of you, my substitute for love investigates the rhythm and timbre of memory, and offers a portrait of collective healing and kinship. The artists orchestrate a shifting constellation of associations in which fragments coalesce to form a layered narrative of loss and longing. Farah-Saad and Universe form ‘momentations’ – conversations between artefacts signifying specific moments or feelings, their meticulously crafted assemblages collapsing temporalities and operating in a non-linear middle space.
The drawings and poems by Universe – visceral meditations on trauma and desire – are integral to and embedded within Farah-Saad’s works, offering both a visual and conceptual counterpoint and a moment of convergence. Farah-Saad and Universe’s ALL ABOUT SURVIVAL PART II (Brothers In Rhythm Mix), a CD listening tower, holds music that is important to the artists’ memories of their adolescence and pertinent to the connections that brought them together; a shared sonic language of growth and catharsis. Universe’s interventions, like the tiny mushroom crystals lining the bed of funerary glass chippings, reassure the mournful motifs in an act of quiet care.
The exhibition is defined by reverberations: the lingering aftermath and the repeated, scattering reflection after the sound source has stopped. Here the works are both the trauma and the mourning, the enduring affect of loss – loss of connection, of control, of innocence, of love. Archive boxes, train station benches, and memorial glass chippings comprise a complex scenography, these familiar objects serving as conduits for memory; weighed down by an embodied history. Farah-Saad and Universe illustrate how we are formed by the objects around us and how, inevitably, we leave a part of ourselves behind, weaving our identity into the very fabric of our surroundings.
'THE FACE OF YOU,
MY SUBSTITUTE FOR LOVE'
Press Release
Selected Press