Open: Thu-Sun 10am-5pm

Gallery 1, Handbag Factory, 3 Loughborough Street, SE11 5RB, London, United Kingdom
Open: Thu-Sun 10am-5pm

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Artists: Faris Nakamura - Bunga Yuridespita

Curator Beverley Harrison, Fascicle Contemporary

We construct sequestered spaces, safe havens in which the Self can reside, whether in urban architectures, rural countrysides, or within our minds. These spaces and edifices become concrete reflections and extensions of the Self, cultural identity and socio-political milieus. Faris Nakamura and Bunga Yuridespita’s sculptures' architectural forms explore this phenomenon, rendering tangible the intangible. What are architectural forms’ implications for identity? Their works explore these experiential nuances of space.

In collaborative tandem, Faris Nakamura and Bunga Yuridespita’s illusory architectural paintings and intermedia artworks explore urban spatial nuances, querying how social and personal spaces intertwine, function and are experienced. Their formal, abstract works open a dialogue on sequestered, liminal spaces of light, shadow and colour. Their works convey uncertain thresholds between secure and tenuous ways of being. Colourful sculptural paintings, performance and filmic media trouble Western one point perspective, presenting multiple vantage points and sightlines. Spatial ambiguity unfolds.

A Soft Space Opened Where None Was Promised, 2026 is a new collaborative work by Faris Nakamura and Bunga Yuridespita. Nakamura restages his freestanding skyscraper-like sculpture. Yuridespita’s filmic media Dance of Dimensions, 2024, streams into Nakamura’s two white wooden twin towers’ apartment-like interiors. The interior is visible through a waist high horizontal strip of glass. The filmic projection simulates light and shadow throughout the sculpture’s interior spaces. Fleetingly, it flashes internal movement throughout hallways and generic living spaces. The light’s movement choreographs a haptic illusion of walking through the space.

This external filmic gaze imprints, not only onto the sculpture’s architectures, but also our minds’ architectures. We imagine an internal reality within. Through spatial interpretation, we try to piece together an undisclosed narrative, connoted by the atmosphere’s uncanny familiarity, yet strangeness. The sculpture’s hard-edged austerity yet ethereal isolation contrasts with Yuridespita’s everyday soundscape of doors opening, dogs barking and footsteps. Thus, the sculpture haunts in its disquieting homeliness and detached observational distancing.

Nakamura views the A Soft Space Opened Where None Was Promised as a protective refuge, for these sensory everyday sounds. Alternatively, could our gaze be that of surveillance, like the Panopticon’s omnipresent gaze of political power, control and censure, described by philosopher Michel Foucault. And yet, looking closely is the point, for it garners visitors’ attentiveness to societal spatial nuances, and the intersplicing of personal, collective and socio-political structures.

Nakamura’s geometric, monochromatic wall sculptures have minimalistic façades that conceal configured internal architectural spaces. These abstracted organic shapes combine both human and non-human forms. We look closely at the hidden spaces behind, to analyse their characteristics. Are these spaces places of refuge or avenues of escape? Their atmosphere is conveyed by light, shadow, and deeply saturated colour - metaphorically and figuratively. The spotlit sculptures caste a rhythmic constellation of light and shadow, along two gallery walls, to create a microcosm within the macrocosm of the gallery.

Yuridespita’s playful filmic performance intervention into urban and rural landscapes, I Did, 2026, acquires an interplay across the gallery with Nakamura’s sculptures. Her colourful cubist-like body sculptures contain frames with mirrors that reflect the outdoors and indoor gallery spaces, everchanging as she moves. The frames connote console screens and query the lens by which we perceive realities. As an architect, Yuridespita integrates architecture, into her illusionist architectural paintings and performances. She will stage a body sculpture performance of The Unfamiliar Familiar, 2026, to activate interconnectedness between the performing artist, the audience, artworks and gallery. The performance will include periodically creating an architectural wall mural from acrylic mirror shards that will reflect her film I Did and the gallery space.

Combined, Yuridespita and Nakamura’s works discourse how societal architectures reflect socio- political spatial allocations and cultural attitudes. In turn, individuals carve out safe spaces. Nonetheless, they are continually impacted and defined, while sequestering refuge, within these spaces. In this sense, their works explore Foucauldian heterotopias and emplacements, places apart yet within society. Where and how do we find ways of inhabiting spaces, to protect and harbour the Self?

The nuances of architecture and the nature of spaces are explored, as we observe these artworks’ configurations. By looking closely, we explore our own stories and shifting perceptions. As well, we experience these works’ physicality, while exploring their uncertain passageways through unknown places. We probe societal urban and personal spaces’ character. In so doing, we imagine potential personal, socio-cultural and intercultural narratives, in relation to place. Is the space inclusionary, exclusionary, a place of refuge, isolation, acceptance or scrutiny?

“Either the heterotopias have the role of creating a space of illusion that denounces all real spaces, all real emplacements [cafes, theatres, galleries] within which life is partitioned off, as being even more illusory...Or on the contrary, creating a different space, a different real space as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorganized, badly arranged and muddled.” (1)

(1) Michel, Foucault, “Different Spaces,” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works 1954-84: Volume Two, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley. 178-181, 142.

Faris Nakamura, Shade of Shelter, Held Within, 2026. Courtesy of Faris Nakamura, photograph courtesy of Beverley Harrison