SEESAW - Final Hot Desert
Location: 29 Ability Plaza, Arbutus Street, London, United Kingdom
(The gallery is located on the second floor of Ability Plaza.)
Dates: 23 January - 28 February 2026
Regular Opening Hours: Open Fridays & Saturdays 12:00 - 17:00 or by appointment.
Artist/s: Zaid Arshad, Shimabuku, TJ Shin
“The exhibition, Seesaw, acts as a cross-section compartment providing space for the coming-togethers and splittings of practices which investigate these same transactions of material and the contextual positioning of use-value.
The cross section is made literal between the vertical gallery window and its thin descending blinds and the lateral, heavy vectors of the gallery’s shelves which visually extend and match to the Overground Line at Haggerston Station visible through the window.
The mechanisms along the continuums of input/output and action/reaction and their “/“ cruxes are presented from different angles: historically through Arshad’s collected objects, personally and experientially through Shimabuku’s scaled actions, and systematically through Shin’s “black boxes” that indifferently sort through inputs.
One thing that seems to emerge across all of the artworks’ functions is the nuanced self-consciousness arrived at after passing over or through them. At what point is this other thing directly relating to your individual presence? Where is that presence positioned between the bounds of that work? And what is its position in relation to others in the internal facing space of the gallery?
According to Pierre Francastel, ‘Art and mathematics are the two poles of any logic thinking—the major thinking modes of humanity.’ In fact, since Greek Antiquity, art and mathematics have always nurtured a natural dialogue, forming together a tissue of opposed polarities, fruitful tensions and partial osmoses. Concepts, symbols and materials often separate the artist and the mathematician, but a common strategy—to think and imagine through dialectic, relational webs—brings them together. For Francastel, ‘As the mathematician … combines schemes of representation and prediction where the real is associated with the imaginary, so the artist confronts elements of representation with other imagination issues. In both cases, the dynamism of a thought that becomes aware of itself by expressing itself and materializing itself in ‘signes-relais’ [’relay-signs’] extends and encompasses elements of experience and those of the logic of the mind.’ The transits between reality and imagination, the Many and the One, the particular and the universal, the local and the global, constitute the very core of mathematical and artistic creativity. If their signes-relais are often different (and, in some cases, the specificity of mathematical signes-relais preclude the possibilities the artist has of entering into the realm of mathematics), the underlying relational protogeometry which governs the intertwining of the different signs can be extremely close.”1
(1) Fernando Zalamea, Multilayered Sites and Dynamic Logics for Transits between Art and Mathematics, Glass Bead, 2016.”
SEESAW, 2026, Installation View. Zaid Arshad, Shimabuku, TJ Shin, Final Hot Desert.
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