New Containers
Dio Dunbar, Archie Fooks-Smith, Alia Hamaoui, Oliver Offord, James Sibley, Moses Tan, Duong Thuy Nguyen, Bernard Walsh.
6 December 2025 - 24 January 2026
One can form a perfectly adequate idea of the universe by considering it under the aspect of a vast museum of natural history exposed to the shock of an earthquake. The door to the collections room is open and broken; there are no more windows. Whole drawers have fallen out, while others hang by their hinges, ready to drop.
– Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues (1821)
Bolding is celebrating its first anniversary with New Containers: our first group exhibition in Marylebone, and the first exhibition in our new, and improved, unit at Alfies Antiques.
The show brings together a group of artists who have taken up in their practices, and in one way or another, the container — the bag, the box, the cabinet, the capsule, the lampshade, the vitrine.
Esme and I have turned over the idea of doing a ‘vitrine’ show for a few months, not least because we are surrounded by them in Alfies. There is a magnificent one on the second floor, which you can see on the way back down toward the gallery from the restrooms. It is wooden, roughly oval in shape but more ornate, with three mirrored shelves. It would be perfect for displaying jewelry. It has always been empty, and, when I first saw it, I half hoped to convince its owner to lend it for an exhibition (even without any idea of what to put inside).
A vitrine is a product of the impulse in the 17th or 18th centuries to collect (or steal) and display, display, display, but it received a complete artistic makeover in the hands of 20th century artists like Louise Nevelson, Joseph Cornell, Betye Saar…. Really, a vitrine is interesting because it is a type of container. The container is obviously a device that reframes. It transforms and recontextualizes even as it serves as a mechanism for enclosure and display. Our first Bolding show in Alfies this April, Oliver Offord’s Vitreous Body, featured a drawing illuminated within a miniature stove, which felt like a ‘new container’. We set off around London to look for other artists who were also working with, and within, new containers.
And what have they found, captured, drafted, or otherwise contained? The drafters—Archie Fooks-Smith, Moses Tan, Oliver Offord himself—have projected their intricate drawings into three dimensional space through three distinct kinds of containers: the psychedelic warp-frame for Fooks-Smith, the found Victorian casings for Tan, and the vitrine itself for Offord. The containers upon/within which these drawings have been grafted become a means by which the drawings can impose themselves, queer themselves, insist upon themselves, destabilize and obscure themselves before the viewer’s body.
James Sibley has caught a pair of plastic chandeliers and hung them in a diorama of middle-class aspiration. Dio Dunbar and Bernard Walsh and have built shrines of a sort: in Dunbar’s lamp, he has restored an actual inner light to the women that Paul Gauguin subjected to his Primitivist gaze. Walsh has torn up a childhood’s worth of football magazines into a backdrop for a shop-window icon of Mick Mills—souvenir images folded into each other and exalted. Duong Thuy Nguyen, for her part, has re-figured the Vietnamese oản cake as a resin sculpture, suspended on an acrylic altar. The transmutation of a traditional ancestral offering into this new aesthetic register maps the phase-shifts of Nguyen’s diasporic experience onto glowing pink plastic. A container is a mixing bowl where an artist can whisk together the sacred and profane.
A container is also a tendentious receptacle for personal and cultural memory. A small fragment of a Roman mosaic can barely recall the beauty of antiquity, but stuff that fragment in a duffel and you’ve got yourself an enticing crime scene. Alia Hamaoui renders us complicit in the spectacle of colonial extraction. Is that real crocodile leather?!
The artists in this exhibition exercise the latest iteration of the perennial ‘archival impulse’—to use Hal Foster’s famous phrase. They have found the busted door to the collections room of this universe hanging wide open, and so they root around, using their new containers to arrange their findings and charge them with new meaning.
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