Between the Acts: 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

In Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell’s Tricolour Standard (2026), process is inseparable from material history. Deconstructed and dyed Union Jack and St George’s flags are knotted with rope, cotton, jute fibre, and military surplus materials, functioning as markers of movement, location, and contested identity. Through acts of binding and transformation, the work treats the past as something materially reconfigured rather than symbolically preserved.

Lyndon Barrois Jr.’s Trunk Show (after Henry Van de Velde & Hergé) (2025) reflects on histories of resource extraction and their influence on artistic form. Positioned within a broader narrative-driven practice, the work reframes style as a byproduct of material circulation and colonial economies, presenting the object as a fragment within an ongoing script.

Simon Moretti’s work in neon entr’acte (2022) introduces a deliberate interruption into the exhibition. Drawing on the legacy of 1970s conceptual art—particularly the text-based works of Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner—the piece foregrounds the interval itself as a site pregnant with meaning. Like these artists, Moretti uses language not simply as a caption but as the material of the artwork itself. The title also echoes Francis Picabia’s 1924 film Entr'acte, a Dadaist interlude designed to disrupt narrative continuity. 

Jhonatan Pulido’s Ebanisteria (2025-2026) revisits the streets of rural Colombia, shaped by histories of civil unrest and social fracture. Evoking gestures of repair and reconstruction, the work extends beyond the personal to implicate the collective body — a recurring concern within Pulido’s practice. Acts of making amends are materially manifest in the many strata of the painting–the subtle pentimenti that trace layers of both memory and longing.  

Margarita Gluzberg’s Green Influence 1960/2020 Mix (2023)  assembles historical pastel colour palettes sourced from the United States and Eastern Europe, producing a constellation of visual echoes extended across time. The piece functions as a form of temporal transmission, collapsing historical distance into a continuous exchange between the reanimation of a past complete with its projective and imagined futures.

In New Leg at Roehampton (Soldier Receiving an Artificial Leg 1915) (2026), a ceramic sculpture paired with a blunted paper stump—first conceived during research at the Henry Moore Institute and later developed while in residency at The Art House in Wakefield—Terence Birch stages the disabled and debilitated body, masculinity, and aesthetic prejudice in order to question where self-worth might reside. Grounded in extensive photographic archival research at Roehampton Hospital—the site where modern prosthetics were developed in the UK in the aftermath of the First World War—Birch was drawn to images focusing on the relationship between patient and prosthetist, depicting scenes of plaster casting and the fitting of prosthetic legs, themselves sculptural processes.

Maria-Cristina Onea’s audio-visual installation Not All Birds Have Feathers (2025-2026) examines humanity’s long-standing fascination with flight, tracing the fragile boundary between reverence and conquest, emulation and control. The work unfolds in a liminal space that shifts between time and place, drawing on personal histories of migration and belonging to form a meditation on aspiration, freedom, and the weight of technological ambition. Accompanying the image carousel is an edited version of Lonesome Town by Ricky Nelson: ‘Maybe down in Lonesome Town, I can learn to forget.” quotes the song, underscoring the work’s tension between longing and loss.