Featuring Lyndon Barrois Jr., Terence Birch, Margarita Gluzberg, Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell, Simon Moretti, Maria-Cristina Onea and Jhonatan Pulido
She had been awakened by the birds. How they sang! attacking the dawn like so many choir boys attacking an iced cake. Forced to listen, she had stretched for her favourite reading – an Outline of History – and had spent the hours between three and five thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then she understood, divided by a channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters; the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend.
Between the Acts, pp.8–9
Alma Pearl is pleased to present Between the Acts, a group show featuring works by Lyndon Barrois Jr. (b. 1983, USA), Terence Birch (b. 1982, United Kingdom), Margarita Gluzberg (b. 1968, Soviet Union), Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell (b. 2000, United Kingdom), Simon Moretti (b. 1974, United Kingdom), Maria-Cristina Onea (b. 1999, Romania), and Jhonatan Pulido (1988, Colombia).
The exhibition takes its title from Virginia Woolf’s posthumous novel Between the Acts, which unfolds around the staging of a village pageant on the eve of the Second World War. In Woolf’s text, the phrase refers both to the literal intervals between scenes and to the play-within-the-play enacted through the actions of the novel’s characters, while also evoking a broader historical suspension: a moment poised between wars. Metaphors ripple through the novel: the elegant flight of birds, poised and refined, at times hints at the ominous transformation into bombers; gestures toward art, histories, and relationships — fleeting, imagined, or deeply felt — intertwine; rehearsals accumulate like echoes, sustaining meaning in the delicate spaces between action and pause.
Drawing on this ambiguity, while at times referencing elements within the novel, Between the Acts considers artistic practice as a site of pause and recalibration — a temporal and material suspension in which histories and locations are revisited, reworked, and held in tension. The exhibition foregrounds the performative and narrative capacities of art, emphasising the pause within the creative process as a space for reflection, one that resonates across both personal and collective histories. Some works turn to the past as a persistent force, shaping a present increasingly defined by uncertainty and rupture — marked by resource extraction, and enduring legacies of conflict and displacement — while others locate meaning in processes of transformation, becoming, and reimagining.
