LONDON @ FERIA MATERIAL: SIX BOOTHS, ZERO EMBARRASSMENT

As a Brit, it’s a rare pleasure to go to an art fair abroad and not come back feeling slightly embarrassed. Vol 12. of Feria Material, however, is one such instance: despite exhibiting over 70 galleries this year, London's six booths absolutely held their own, and with unusual discipline to boot. Victoria Comstock-Kershaw reports from Mexico City.

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BROOKE BENINGTON

Super sexy and super dichotomous: the booth props up Juno Calypso’s sensual, boudoire-esque photography next to Yeni Mao’s metallic, suspended sculptures.

Installation photography courtesy of gallery

I’m loving this resurgence of hanging art objects! Mao’s sculptures manage to harness both H. R. Giger’s biomechanical erotics and the woven calm of Ruth Asawa, Calypso’s photography updates all the glossy, sybaritic qualities of old-school glamour photography to the post-internet age. The works sit on differing ends of long spectrums: pinks v. greys, photography v. sculpture, flesh v. form, but both are ostensibly about the body and how we construct it (both literally and figuratively). 

Installation photography courtesy of gallery

The both activates formal tension — glossy intimacy on one wall, cold apparatus on the other — but also a metaphysical one. The installation stages the body as an engineering problem (Calypso gives you the softened surface of desire, Mao the devices that make that surface possible). The two artists in conjunction feel like implants for a subject who has internalised optimisation, pleasure routed through design, a contemporary psyche in which seduction is inseparable from the architecture of management.

COPPERFIELD

Sophie Jung’s work is semiotic in the way a good dirty joke is semiotic: you recognise the mechanism, you follow the steps, you end up in a place you didn’t expect to admit you wanted. The materials are doing enormous and gorgeous narrative work — repurposed car bonnets, scales, globes combined with taxidermy, horse tail, cat hair — to allow the sculptures to build miniature character-systems out of matter. The charm comes from that combination of absurdity and tenderness.

Installation photography courtesy of gallery

Like Brooke Benington’s booth, it’s aggressively suggestive in a very sensual way. Jung’s works are visual chains of reasoning; one element recruits the next into an escalating anatomy. The car bonnet of Domestic Model (Mother Hood) becomes a tongue giving cunnilingus when considered in conjunction with the tights draped over the top, the toilet seat above becomes a clitoris, the photograph of children tacked to the back becomes both a warning and a reminder of the natural conclusion of these kinds of activities.

Installation photography courtesy of gallery

I am head over heels in love with The Madam (2026), a miniature, fox stole-toting tower tethered to the wall made of a postcard stand and paperweight, the panopticonic scale implied by miniature railway signs and a paperweight acting as a tuned mass damper (an anti-seismic piece of architecture that begins oscillating out of phase with the motion of the structure when a building or machine starts vibrating at a particular frequency). It’s so gloriously disciplinary: fetish-object, city-object, moral allegory all at once.

DES BAINS

Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez Cambana’s tender images, trapped inside yellow resin frames, do something deceptively simple: they impose a barrier between the lived experience  of their subjects and the spectator of experience by introducing a literal membrane between the subject and the viewer. Cambana captures (literally) moments of children and families in suspended domesticity: living rooms, birthday parties, babies, the sort of photos your family will have a million shoeboxes of somewhere under the stairs if you’re born before 2005.

Installation photography courtesy of gallery

The strongest work lands with an image of an infant, glaring both at and beyond the camera: when, asks Cambana and this small, squat child, does a person become aware of being seen, represented, turned into an image and then into an interpretable object? It’s an identity question, sure, but it’s more about how identity gets split into legible qualities; it’s about the moment “I exist” becomes “I can be known.” There’s a lens of transitionality between not only the content and subjects of his work but the way the viewer is being asked to approach them in a phenomenological sense. Any audience must traverse the veil of empathetic relations in order to find immersion in these kinds of hyper-personal, homely representations of private life; Cambana just makes the veil solid (and out of yellow plastic).

Installation photography courtesy of gallery

The karaoke machine artwork also encourages this overarching exploration of interaction. I admit I haven’t spent a huge amount of time considering the hermeneutics of karaoke but it’s an interesting activity in ontological terms: in his breakdown of Diasporic Performativity in the Practice of Karaoke, Luis Pascasio argues that kareoke fosters diasporic performativity, dissolving binaries like performer/spectator, immigrant/American-born, and homeland/hostland to enable social critique and emotional bonds. Meaning is neither purely “authored” nor purely “received,” but produced in the interval between the original track and the live body that reanimates it. In that interval, language becomes collective property. The song’s fixed structure functions like Cambana’s resin (an imposed frame) yet the affectation is the opposite of distance. Karaoke is a porous boundary around speech.

SEASON 4 EPISODE 6

Conor Ackhurst’s solo begins with blunt inversion: two pianos, one stacked upside down on the other, surrounded by Beuys-esque felt pressings of concert halls in (extremely tasteful) wooden frames.  

Installation photography courtesy of gallery

A piano’s job, as is that of all instruments, is to produce control: weighted keys, regulated vibration, disciplined resonance. Felt’s job is to silently (or not) abet this control, normally hidden in the action as dampener, regulator, and restraint. What is usually internal to performance is, here, extracted and exhibited: the apparatus that conditions sound becomes visible evidence of where that sound is going to eventually end up. The entire booth is, essentially, one big exercise in Lacanian translation: the Imaginary (the inner, the id, the material of the inner workings of the piano) translated into the Real (the outer, the ego, the sculpture-simulacra of a space in which the piano will be played). The concert hall becomes an institutional diagram, a spatial Big Other that authorises expression by delimiting it. Ackhurst balances between these two registers by materialising the instrument’s logic of restraint into the cuts, limits, and protocols that allow expression to count as “music” in the first place.

Installation photography courtesy of gallery

Once again, the booth raises the question of how we construct ourselves (with)in positions of cultural, intellectual and creative authority. Ackhurst exposes the concert hall’s libido for discipline and our own desire for control. It’s less obviously about sex than, say, Sophie Jung’s work or Studio/Chapple’s booth, but the underlying, BDSM-adjacent element of restraint, impact and mark-making is still there.

SOUP

A follow on from her Silly Bitch show last year in May, Tulani Hlalo returns to dog grooming as a metonymy for the standardisation of self, the construction of identity, the natural world bending beneath the will of man. The tufted wall pieces are a nice material continuation of this conversation (like Ackhurst, she brings the Imaginary - the idea of the non-human - into the Real); wool is an animal byproduct, shaped here to look like cartoon animals, it’s simulacra, it’s Baudrillard all the way down. “If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them.” he once said, and Hlalo re-engages this idea by asking us why we generally accept things like dog competitions, but are much more icky about child beauty pageants, only for that distaste to, if not disappear, decrease in the face of sports (Hlalo was herself a child gymnast). All three are ostensibly about the judgement of form; all three reach different conclusions about where and why it becomes acceptable for bodies to become sites of competition. 

Tulani Hlalo, Runner Up, 1988

Baudrillard’s response to the question of why animality is, in sexual and eugenic terms, a world away from putting children in skintight leotards and telling them to jump is that a bitch won’t ask how high. He argues that animals lack an unconscious due to the fact they possess a direct, lived relationship with their territory, whereas humans developed an unconscious only after losing this organic connection. This tension exists also in Hlalo’s work and the formal quality of her ‘moving-image’ portraits, where she is uncomfortably stuck not just in the frame of the canvas-screen but within a giant papier mache ribbon: she is literally trapped by a synecdoche of judgement and spectatorship in and on to the natural world. 

Photography courtesy of Fetch

To return to the sado-masochistic theme running throughout the London booths, the ribbon is almost a bondage device in the way it holds her in place (a sister-subject to Yeni Mao’s chastity-device sculptures at Brooke Benington - I assume there is a proper term for the devices that keep your arms spread eagle a la Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary, but frankly my google searches are odd enough as it is so I won’t look it up). There’s a sexual undertone to many of the works London is presenting, although perhaps the ‘kinkification’ of the organic form is the most obvious at Soup. It’s not the only one that’s had fun with its wall space (Studio/Chapple is painted in red; DES BAINS in charming pastels), but it is the one that symbolically succeeds at letting the works bleed into its surroundings the most. The booth is covered in folded blue curtains, which not only further echoes the pageantry/stage setting (are we on stage, or back stage?) but also of boudoirs, of brothels, of BDSM ‘playrooms’. If you want to go the extra feminist mile you could even argue for a yonic reading of the “folds” and how this ties into notions of breeding and birth, but maybe not over breakfast. 

STUDIO/CHAPPLE

Maria Joranko’s sculptures are, much like the artist, sexy and serious: rust, metal, plastic, motifs of chronic pain and its effect on the mind and body. 

Photography courtesy of gallery

The strongest work is a pair of disembodied legs rendered as leather boots, posed in an unmistakable citation of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, with the word “desire” placed along the upper sole (the implication being that, should she kick, she would castrate you quite literally with your own desire). The piece also sharpens a question that runs across the London booths: where does the subject reside when identity is mediated by costume, pose, and the gaze that interprets them? Is the sculpture the boots, or the woman within them? If she kicks, who hurts first?

Photography courtesy of gallery

Wittgenstein’s private-language problem hovers over these forms and helps separate sign from sensation: clothes, poses, and labels circulate publicly, but pain does not circulate in the same way (saying “I have a headache” looks grammatically like possession, but there is no inner “thing” you can privately point to and thereby secure the meaning of the word). Joranko stages the violence of this asymmetry: her screaming, bicephalic busts (YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE/LILITH, 2025) and rusted wall plaques speak to the boundary (and language’s failure to cross it) between naming and knowing.

FINAL THOTS

Restraint keeps reappearing – dampeners, frames, curtains, grooming, boots – as a technology that produces meaning by limiting it, and produces subjects by ‘binding’ them into readable positions. London’s strongest showing at Material is its insistence that identity is assembled through apparatuses, protocols, and staged forms of address (rather than merely expressed), which explains so much of the city’s contribution leaned sculptural (yes yes, I know we say painting is dead every year). All of these works continue to pull the metaphysical question of subject-formation back into matter and, taken together, many seem to propose that subjectivity is manufactured through constraint, and that cultural authority operates by regulating the conditions under which sensation becomes acceptable speech. 

It’s a good look for London, especially when the city’s own trade reality is increasingly procedural. With high-end buying still cautious after the 2024 downturn, and only small policy wins (like the extension of Temporary Admission for art to four years) the broader environment is still that of a market where dealers are increasingly reliant on established clients and fewer buyers are taking speculative swings.  These booths make apparatus visible – frames, dampeners, curtains, rules – because apparatus is what currently decides what can be said, what can be shown, and what can be sold.

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Victoria Comstock-Kershaw is a London-based arts writer, reviewer, and God's favourite critic.`