Condo London: Dialogues Between Galleries

Continuing the initiative that energized London galleries for nearly a month last year, Condo returns this year with an even more extensive program, bringing together 49 international galleries.

We are delighted to present a selection of works from Condo, reflecting the upcoming artistic landscape for this new year.

Our entry point into the Condo event is none other than the socially engaged and impactful work of artist Dineo Seshee Bopape.

Dineo Seshee Bopape, born in 1981 during a year of significant global events, explores themes of self-sovereignty and presence through her art. Her creative process engages with the metaphysics of self and matter, addressing personal and collective wounds against the backdrop of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. Drawing inspiration from Afro-diasporic spiritual aesthetics, Bopape creates immersive installations that weave storytelling, sculpture, drawing, video, and sound. Her work reflects a deep engagement with history, spirituality, and the interplay between personal and universal experiences. Through her practice, Bopape navigates a world that has undergone profound shifts since her birth, positioning herself within the evolving global narrative.

We have to remember and recall
We’re in a time of calling back
We have experienced so much fragmentation…
(Because of so many reasons)
What is needed now for movement is all our members,
All our members on so many levels…
Bringing back all our pieces together so we can move together: whole.”

"we need the memories of all our members" reflects the humanistic and redemptive approach in Bopape's work, where the message itself becomes an object that must be pieced together by humans in order to be understood.

In Bopape’s eponymous video, John Coltrane’s seminal 1964 recording of ‘A Love Supreme’ plays in the background as the artist licks chocolate from a pane of glass, slowly replacing it with her own image. Through this sensual yet laborious process of unmasking, Bopape is consciously countering the erasure of the lives and work of Black women. Since the colour of chocolate parallels the colour of her skin, it’s as if she’s consuming herself, uncovering the actual self behind what is visible at first glance.

For Condo London 2025, Union Pacific hosts blank projects (Cape Town, South Africa), and Gypsum Gallery (Cairo, Egypt), presenting works by Zayn Qahtani, Velma Rosai-Makhandia, Dineo Seshee Bopape, and Nada Elkalaawy. Each of these artists uses memory (whether truth or fiction) as a vessel to explore questions of loss, connection to place, and femininity. Together, their practices tread the line between the real and the remembered; the mundane and the magical; life and afterlife.

Qahtani works across painting, drawing and sculpture to produce work that draws on her own heritage, ancient cultures and nature’s diverse ecosystems as a means to create visual stories which seem to exist in the twilight zone - too distorted to be real, too familiar to be a dream. During the odyssey within the story and Qahtani's paintings, the character is split into many versions of the Self, with the most notable being the Anti-Self, or the poltergeist.

Velma Rosai-Makhandia is a Kenyan contemporary artist born in 1986, renowned for merging mythological elements with abstract figurative paintings.
Her work delves into themes of Blackness, intuition, and African spirituality, reflecting a deep connection to her heritage. In her debut solo exhibition, "The Ways of My Serpent Mother are Strange," she explored regeneration and the cyclical nature of the body's rituals, drawing inspiration from ancient symbolism. Rosai-Makhandia's practice is characterized by a solitary and introspective approach, allowing her to tap into unfiltered inspiration and transfer intuitive images and symbols onto paper. Her paintings often exist between forms, reflecting her personal transformations and the dynamic evolution of her internal life.

For Condo 2025, Carlos Ishikawa decided to present the work of Moka Lee.
Moka Lee’s portraits capture the likeness of social media strangers. The painter’s intimate canvases explore the gap between who we are and who we pretend to be ‘A face alone can say so many things,’ says Moka Lee. ‘It indicates so much about a person, and I think understanding small nuances and being able to observe the tiniest flickers of emotion is quite fun and necessary.’ The artist, who lives and works in Seoul, paints enigmatic portraits of young women that explore the gap between who we are and how we appear. For inspiration, she turns to what she calls ‘the most convenient tool’ when you’re after an ever-expanding pool of images: social media.

Lee often comes up with a narrative, then scrolls through various social-media channels. When she stumbles upon a post she likes, she contacts the account holder and buys the rights to paint an enlarged and adjusted version of the photograph. ‘This process allows me to empathize with the subject,’ she tells me. ‘But there isn’t any real personal interaction, which I think is representative of how we live today.’ Lee believes that such emotional distance enables her to approach her subjects objectively and to reconfigure their characters with precision.

Carlos Ishikawa also opened a new exhibition of Sable Elyse Smith’s entitled LAUGH TRACK, OR WHO'S THAT PEEKING IN MY WINDOW (2021), which explores the intersections of surveillance, humor, and trauma within institutional systems. Initially shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2022, the work reflects Smith’s sharp critique of systemic violence. "This violence I’m tracing at the scale of intimacy, at the scale of language, and the scale of infrastructure. And sometimes these three are intimately networked, like some haphazard laugh track threaded through our popular forms of entertainment."

On the occasion of Condo, Nova Contemporary presents Pillows, a duo exhibition of works by Pam Virada and James Prapaithong. Framing the gallery as a domestic refuge, the exhibition explores how interiority, both spatial and psychological, harbors secrets, comforts, and memory.

The exhibition’s title draws from the concept of "pillow words" in Japanese waka poetry, literary devices used to shape musicality and atmosphere. This tactic is also where Yasujirō Ozu, whom both artists have referenced, roots his cinematic "pillow shots”, in which he employs stillness to amplify the frequencies of latent feelings and unexpressed desires. Depicting scenes from tender, focused observation, Virada and Prapaithong’s works articulate the poetic resonances within the marginal and the elliptical, demonstrating how emptiness can be reclaimed as a mode of authorial agency.

In his lush beds of colour and texture, Prapaithong unveils intricate compositions of light and shadow. Each of his visual grounds are carefully drawn out, with a precision akin to a camera’s indiscriminate grasp. He fixes the fleeting while retaining a sense of equivocation; the paintings are lucid yet reticent as if emerging from a powdery haze.

Crafted from found trays, Virada’s sconce sculptures merge the utilitarian and the lyrical. She combines multiple registers of visual information, overlaying images of abstracted windows with prints of privacy films. Her deployment of directional ambiguity sutures the exterior and the interior, leaving one to wonder whether they are looking in or out.

In both artists' practices, the gesture of superimposition is not only visual but also mental, reflecting the way memory and experience layer upon one another as a palimpsest. The transparency of the gallery’s glass windows also establishes a self-referential experience of voyeurism for the viewer, offering vectors of both exposure and concealment. Pillows is a hushed meditation on how we appraise the spaces, objects, and moments that are dear to us, and how they take on a second life by persisting within us.