Domestic Flights: Curated by Cara Nahaul

Domestic Flights serves as a contemplative counterpart to Livelihood, shifting the focus inward to the intimate corners of human life. For this group exhibition, a diverse group of painters were selected, whose work explores the interplay between interior spaces and the landscapes of imagination they reflect. Each artist offers a unique window into private worlds where daily life unfolds and thoughts take flight. From sun-scorched houses to dimly lit bedrooms, the exhibition delves into the emotional and psychological resonance of domestic spaces. These interiors, shaped by memory and longing, become vessels for both escape and transformation. 

 

Jai Chuhan’s bold canvases examine the female gaze in confined, room-like spaces. Chuhan’s portraits feature a number of personal and anonymous figures to challenge perceptions of gender, isolation and identity. Through a combination of memory and observation, they reimagine the psychological tensions between alienation and connection. Mircea Teleagă’s oil paintings explore landscapes, borders, and liminal spaces. Teleagă’s works focus on mysterious, human-occupied environments, capturing the subtle traces of life left behind in spaces that exist between the natural and the man-made world. 

 

Miyeon Yi’s paintings depict figures within interior spaces either alone or grouped together, engaged in shared activities such as card games or family rituals. Yi’s work explores the dynamics of coexistence and separation, highlighting how individuals connect or remain isolated within these intimate settings, examining both physical and emotional proximity. Lastly, the work of Anna Sebastian finds its concerns centred on more personally internal ‘spaces’ – themes of religion, myth, history and psychoanalysis that define an inner life and landscape. Her large scale drawing in this exhibition is a complex and delicately unfolded narrative memory of a journey through the Arizona desert. 

 

All the artists are united by the tension between containment and expansiveness - walls and windows, rooms and thresholds, inviting a closer look at how the inner world mirrors and reimagines the external. Through varied textures, palettes, and perspectives, each artist explores how the personal and universal collide within these intimate spaces. Domestic Flights compliments Livelihood by shifting the lens from the exterior to the interior, offering a dual exploration of human life in its many forms. Where Livelihood captures the rhythms of public and communal existence, Domestic Flights invites us to pause and consider the sanctuaries we create for ourselves and the imagined landscapes that emerge within. Together, both exhibitions create a dialogue about the spaces we inhabit and the traces of ourselves that remain in the world, both inside and out. 

 

 

Jai Chuhan is an Indian-born British artist based in London. Chuhan was born in India and emigrated to London with her family in the late 1960s. She attended and graduated from the Slade School of Art at University College London in the 1970s. Chuhan uses vivid colour in expressionistic paintings that consider the female gaze in depictions of the body. Each seemingly confined and isolated in a room-like space, an arena for exploring psychological tensions in symbioses of male and female, home and ‘unhome’. Anonymous figures observed in the city are complemented by portrayal of people she knows including self-portraiture, re-imagining from a combination of observation, memory and photographs she takes or sees on media platforms. The images reflect transcultural aesthetic influences inspired by her position as an Indian-born British artist.

 

Chuhan’s work currently features in the Hayward Touring show Acts of Creation (2024-25) curated by Hettie Judah. She was nominated by Peter Doig for the David and Yuko Art Foundation Grant exhibition that he curated at Annely Juda, London (2024). Her paintings have been exhibited internationally including in China, USA, Italy, Sweden, Turkey and in the UK including at Tate Liverpool; Barbican, London; Arnolfini, Bristol; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Tramway, Glasgow; The Lowry, Salford; Pitzhanger, London. Solo exhibitions include at Champ Lacombe, Biarritz, France (2024); Qrystal Partners, London (2023); Paris Internationale with Champ Lacombe, Paris (2023); HOME for Asia Triennial Manchester (2018). 

 

Chuhan’s paintings and drawings are in collections including the Tate, Arts Council Collection, Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool, Cartwright Hall, Bradford. Publications include Jai Chuhan: Small Paintings monograph, Hurtwood (2023); The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting III, Anomie (2024).  

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Mircea Teleagă (b.1989, Rădăuți, Romania) currently lives and works in London. He received his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London (2014-16).

 

Teleagǎ is best known for his humanless scapes painted in oil and acrylic on canvas. Balancing between landscapes and urban environments, the artist approaches the application of paint almost as if a shapeshifter; from virtuously to vigorously, opaque to transparent, and lucid to destructive. By doing so, in Teleagă’s practice, painting becomes a tool to capture impalpable spaces, as he is interested in the notion of emotional ownership of places—an outer world depicting or reflecting an inner world. Born in the year of the Romanian Revolution, Teleagă’s youth and background growing up during the aftermath of Romania’s uneasy transition from communism to capitalism form a battlefield where personal memories collide with collective history.

 

Teleagă’s work has been exhibited at Theo Gallery, Seoul; Unit 1 Gallery Workshop, London; Sarabande Foundation, London; OHSH, London; John Martin Gallery, London; Bo.Lee Gallery, London; Gyeongju International Art Festival, Gyeongju; Space K Gallery, Seoul. Teleagă has taken part in international residencies at Space K ArtLab, Gwacheon, South Korea; NKD, Dale, Norway; KHNP, Gyeongju, South Korea; Sarabande, London; the Academy of Visual Arts, HKBU, Hong Kong. 

 

His work can be found in collections worldwide including the AVA Collection, Hong Kong; Kolon Collection, Seoul; KHNP Collection, Gyeongju; Sarabande Collection, London; Simons & Simmons Collection, London; Soho House Collection Amsterdam and Paris. Teleagă is the recipient of the Sarabande Lee Alexander McQueen Award awarded to him by Dinos Chapman. 

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Anna Sebastian currently lives and works in London. Sebastian received her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London (2021-23). 

 

Sebastian’s work delves into imagined and emotional realities, challenging the conventional boundaries between the natural and the artificial, as well as the evident and the perceived. Her practice is deeply rooted in alternative and imagined realities, drawing inspiration from myth, history, and religion. Through her paintings, Sebastian navigates the interplay between the natural and artificial realms, offering a glimpse into emotional states accessible through practices such as psychoanalysis and esoteric belief systems influenced by non-Western traditions. Her oeuvre shapes these emotional landscapes, inviting viewers to contemplate the complexities of perception and reality. 

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Miyeon Yi (b.1995, Seoul, South Korea), currently lives and works in London. Yi received her MFA from the Royal College of Art, London (2021-23) and her Bachelor of Fine Arts, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2013-17).

 

Yi’s work often depicts groupings and isolations of figures within the framing of interior structure. If not squeezed into one object or space, these figures form a community by implementing common actions, such as playing card games or preparing for a family rituals. They show individuality as well as generality as a member of a group. She is attracted to the communication and recognition of coexistence within between the figures that are separated into different quality of spaces or the moments of the narrative. Figures are often in their own living space filling in the void of life with meaningless tasks while turning away from the weight of the drama, experiencing freedom as well as ennui. The animals in her works have similar presence to that of exiting and entering of actors of the Nō theatre, crossing the hashigakari (suspension) bridge.