AORA is excited to announce LUMA, a monumental collaborative exhibition in the heart of London, bringing together art, design, architecture and music around AORA’s core tenets of calm and wellbeing. An active exhibition, it is curated by Jenn Ellis and brings together the works of 20 international artists and designers in collaboration with seven leading global galleries and private supporters. Across sculpture, painting and installation, LUMA, sheds light on the ebb and flow of structural pause and flux and is accompanied by a public programme comprising performances and talks. The moment is presented in partnership with Kinrise set across 8,000 sq ft of their Silbury + East site, two historic warehouses o Old Street, soon to be renovated into a contemporary workspace later on this year. In dialogue with Silbury + East’s state between construction and development, LUMA ultimately addresses transition, unpacking its environmental, physical and emotional associations.

In a first instance, we’re invited to engage with notions of the environment. Contemplating nature and its vivacity are the luscious paintings by Ana Benavides and Beatrice Hasell-McCosh, as well as the delicate drawings by Gregory Hodge, each presenting dierent geographical contexts and flora. Reflecting on earth’s relationship with humanity and vice versa, Lucia Pizzani invites us through her totemic structures to engage with the shifts in our spirituality and attunement to nature, a tension that is also addressed by Zoë Marden’s subaquatic ceramics. Addressing the environment through the lens of societal structures, Oren Pinhassi presents several sculptures from ‘The Crowd’, which question how our constructed frameworks govern yet divide us as individuals. Similarly contemplating the self and our systems, whether inherited or self-defined, are the installations by Yeni Mao. Taking a more architectural approach to our surroundings and reflecting on trace and instance are Laura Gannon’s works, which address structural power and meticulous control.

 Tim Ralston, Benni Allan, Oren Pinhassi, Alexandre Canonico and David Murphy. Photography by James Retief

Permeating throughout LUMA is equally a sense of physicality. The works by Adeline de Monseignat relate to a sense of touch, sight and movement while the pieces by Andrea V Wright, in their voluptuous drapery and overlay, seem to emphasise contact and skin. Delicacy and presence is conveyed by Jodie Carey’s works, which further highlight the act of trace, while our relationship with the ground and sense of gravity is explored through Benni Allan’s ‘Low Collection’. Alexandra Searle’s interventions defy expectations of weight exploring levity, push and pull while a sense of structural play is also explored through Alexandre Canonico’s sculptural work. Contemplating surfaces, the works of David Murphy play with the textures of material and how they engage with space, a sensibility that is equally conveyed by Tim Ralston’s work through its layering and seeming evocation of patina.

LUMA also considers the relationship between transition and emotion. Dawn Ng’s ‘Into Air’ works, from photography to video, express the passing of time as a shape, colour and form through the ultimate ephemeral material that is ice. Through layers of tone and portraying dierent states of existence, Ng’s works convey a spectrum of sentiments, a sense that is also felt in the painting works by Anna Blom that combine painterly application with a relinquishment to environmental intervention. Combining colour with feeling are the painterly installations by Mit Jai Inn, which grounded in buddhism relate to the giving and receiving of energy. Exploring catharism and bodily movement is the painting work by Gregory Hodge, a relationship that is tied back to a sense of urban place, an approach which is equally conveyed in Alexandre Canonico’s painting work. With a greater focus on expression, Ross Taylor’s painting has a hint of figuration, seemingly revealing yet veiling a theatre of emotions.

Ultimately, LUMA addresses the inbetween and calmly unveils its tension points. Creating a dialogue with a building in flux at a global moment of great change, the group exhibition points to humanising commonalities amidst pluralistic responses to what surrounds us, how we physically engage and what we feel.

Text by Jenn Ellis