Keeping Things Whole
Curation by Gabriela Román González
Showcasing the work of of Aileen Gavonel, Lucia Pizzani, María Helena Toscano, Mena Guerrero and Sebastián Espejo
The exhibition title is borrowed from Mark Strand's poem Keeping Things Whole, extending its reflection on the continuous reciprocity between human and more-than-human life.
Presented by Not The Owners and CASA at Brixton House, part of Acts of Looking, the final chapter of Lines of Flight, CASA’s year-round multi-arts programme
7 – 30 October 2026
Keeping Things Whole explores artistic practices that understand the world as a continuous conversation between human and more-than-human life. It begins from the belief that we shape the world just as much as the world shapes us, yet somewhere along the way we have forgotten how to recognise this reciprocal relationship.
The exhibition brings together works that emerge from sustained relationships with the living world: plants, landscapes, organic materials, ecologies, and natural processes. It is interested in how art can help us recover forms of attention that contemporary life tends to suppress, as a way of remembering that we are inseparable from other forms of life that surround us. Across many of these works, the artists do not disappear, but often step aside, allowing other forms of life, other temporalities and other forms of agency to come into focus. It invites us to recognise ourselves not as observers standing outside the living world, but as participants in an ongoing process of mutual transformation.
