Private View: Thursday, 6th February 2025, 6-8pm
London (Tower Bridge)
Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery is delighted to present All About Eve, a group exhibition co-curated by Soheila Sokhanvari and Kristin Hjellegjerde. The show’s title is taken from the 1950 film of the same name, which follows the tale of Margo Channing, an aging Broadway star, whose career is threatened by the younger, more ambitious Eve. Drawing on the film’s complex dynamics of rivalry, power, and vulnerability, the exhibition traces the history of patriarchy and misogyny, right back to the Biblical story of creation, exploring everything from religious rituals and cosmology to contemporary forms of gender-based inequality.
Coinciding with her solo exhibition at the Barbican Centre’s Curve gallery, Balinese artist Citra Sasmita presents two paintings on cloth, reinterpreting the Kasaman style of painting which traditionally depicted stories from male-centric Hindu and local epics with her own imagined narrative fragments around feminine energies which are embodied both in female figures and in elements from the natural world. Meanwhile, Lindsay Seers presents an image created by placing light-sensitive paper in her mouth, ‘turning herself into the camera.’ This act challenges the traditional relationship between subject and camera, allowing Seers to take control of the process. By doing so, she also confronts photography’s history of objectification, using the medium to reclaim agency rather than being reduced to an object of the gaze.
Iraqi artist Afifa Aleiby merges personal experience with collective mythologies in paintings that explore the complexities of love, loss, and female agency. In Daphne and Apollo, the tragic myth reflects the loss of female power, while Eternal Echo evokes the haunting weight of silenced histories. Anne Zanele Mutema’s textile installation similarly acts as a ‘memory map,’ tracing the emotional imprints of historical narratives within the female form. The varying degrees of clarity and fading lines ask how much power we truly have over the stories that surround us, especially those imposed by external forces.
Italian artist Carolina Mazzolari also reflects on the ways in which narratives are filtered through and written into the body. Figure V, part of her ongoing Archetypes series, takes a shape reminiscent of an embalmed body, inscribed with symbols or a coded system that looks at once strikingly contemporary and ancient. As such, she calls our attention to the enduring ways in which women’s bodies have been used as vessels for societal narratives. Sutapa Biswas, meanwhile, presents an extraordinarily visceral painting inspired by her personal experiences of childbirth and of becoming a mother. In this work, mother and baby are depicted as an interconnected, hybrid figure, while the smoky wings billowing out of the woman’s side are suggestive of her own transformation and rebirth.
Ruth Speer’s painting comprises different components that appear as if they could be cut out and assembled to create a three-dimensional figure. The figure is a centaur, traditionally male in Greek myth, but androgynous here, with different options for costumes and props inviting a playful approach to gender – hair of varying length, a crown, a basket of apples, a sword, a loaf of bread – that also calls into question the authority of mythological narratives. Bouke de Vries also considers reinvention in a new iteration of his ongoing memory vessels series, comprising two ewers – one made from glass and containing broken fragments (representing Margot from All About Eve) and the other repaired with in Kintsugi technique (representing Eve). These vessels, connected by a chain, can be seen as an exploration of how women are often pitted against one another, yet are bound by shared experiences of vulnerability and resilience.
Zayn Qahtani alsoapproaches the female body as a vessel of creation, not just in terms of growing and birthing another body, but reflecting the continual (re)invention the self as well as imagining the body as a portal between the earth and the cosmos. Both of the sculptures shown here are made with the nacre (the pearlescent inner lining) of abalone shells, which the artist uses for its poetic, alchemical quality. Meanwhile, a painting by Shadi Al-Atallah explores the ways in which we relate to one another and to the unknown. The work depicts two figures tangled in a tense, almost suspended state – merging, resisting and surrendering all at once.
Other works reflect on nature as a source of identity, origin and renewal. Sophy Rickett presents new works that pair imagery from her project The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows with fragments of from a new text tracing the river Teign, meditating on time, circularity and rebirth, while paintings from Meghdad Lorpour’s Nashi Wind series depict the foaming spray of the sea as it crashes into the coastline along Persian Gulf, evoking both the physical reshaping of land and the emotional transformations tied to personal and collective loss. The paintings are titled after a Hormozgan-province winter wind, which, although invisible, becomes symbolic of the subtle but profound changes in both the natural world and human experience.
A still life painting by Gordon Cheung titled Legends of the Lake (Nanjing) also considers the consequences of human action. Through a distorted image of a Chinese Imperial scroll painting that forms the background of the work, Cheung reflects on the theft of cultural heritage and the erasure of history. Meanwhile, in the foreground, wilting flowers and stock listings comment on the environmental and social toll of humanity’s insatiable pursuit of wealth and knowledge, mirroring the ways women are often consumed and erased by forces of power and ownership. This notion of consumption is also explored in a still life painting by Iranian artist Farah Ossouli which depicts a decapitated female head alongside fruit and a jug of wine. The composition speaks to the continued suppression of and violence against women, but, as Ossouli notes, it is also a reminder that only in death, i.e. still life, a human being would be deprived of its ability to act. A painting from her series Hafiz, named after the 14th-century Persian poet, goes further to highlight the power and inspiration - life force - that comes from making and engaging with art.
In this way, All About Eve not only examines past and current oppressions but celebrates the resilience and strength that arise from them, offering new visions of empowerment and creative expression.
