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.