Laila Majid
Things to Come
Sherbet Green: 16 March - 22 April 2023
PV: Wednesday 15 March, 6 - 9pm
Harlesden High Street: 20 March - 22 April 2023; Finissage: Saturday 22 April, 6 - 9pm
Sherbet Green and Harlesden High Street are reimagined as two novel locations existing across the confines of various spatial definitions. Two separate, colliding worlds shift between the recognisable forms of bedroom, wetroom, office, and spa, familiar yet displaced. They retain connection through an allusion to the boundaries of physical space: public versus private, pleasure versus pain, and soiled versus wiped clean. Touch becomes illuminated in this built universe, a constellation of imagined encounters shared between indexical bodies, their actions and events mapped out in fingerprints and other marks. Spaces of exchange – of sensation, desire and longing – are populated with ambiguous objects that imply a sense of their use while ultimately working against ideas of functionality.
The lingering gaze of the viewer on the minute details of this cast realm forms part of the work, exemplifying the intimacy and sensual potential of generic, often clinical locations, and perpetuating a play on the act of looking and moving in transcendent patterns in the areas of daily life. These moments – with their cracks, holes and bulges – leave room for a wanting of more as they oscillate between the inanimate and the human, their surfaces gaining new life as skin grows new cells.
Laila Majid (b. 1996) lives and works in London. She graduated from her MA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2021, and additionally completed an MSt in Film Aesthetics at the University of Oxford last year. She has recently shown work at solo exhibition Wipe Clean, Rose Easton, London (2022); and at group exhibitions including City Entwined, Paradise Row, London (2022); MELTDOWN, Ridley Road Project Space, London (2022); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London, and Firstsite, Colchester (2021); Nude, Fotografiska, Stockholm and New York (2021). Last year, her video work south florida sky, made in collaboration with artist Louis Blue Newby, was selected for the CIRCA x Dazed Class of 2022 award.
