Subtitle Labs is excited to announce Slalom, a duo show between Hafsa Nouman and Katie Kaur opening on Wednesday 13th May.
The exhibition explores water, not as a passive landscape, but as a site of accumulation - where movement, memory, and material residue converge.
Bringing into dialogue the distinct practices of Hafsa Nouman and Katie Kaur, the exhibition considers how bodies of water carry, connect, and displace. Nouman works through reflective painted surfaces that register the viewer’s presence indirectly, representing river ecologies through shifting material textures that pool, absorb, and resist capture. The act of looking becomes mediated through reflection, where vision is slowed and entangled with one’s own position as the witness. In Kaur’s paintings the Panjabi rivers emerge as a poetic force: an ever-present witness to human experience and a space to hold separation, relation, and feeling in tension. Fragments of hand-stitched canvas are pieced together, their seams breaking the surface and disrupting any sense of a fixed time or place.
Both artists share a connection to Punjab - Nouman through Lahore, and Kaur through diasporic inheritance - approaching it from distinct geographic and experiential positions. Where Nouman’s reflective surfaces resist fixity, never fully settling into a stable image, Kaur’s fluid layers briefly coalesce into moments of focus - offering glimpses of landscape or figure - before slipping away. Together, their works attend to what cannot be fully held: inherited histories, emotional residues, and the shifting conditions of relation.
The exhibition asks what is carried, what erodes, and what settles over time. The works are accompanied by new poems written by Kevin Omosele.
By appointment only:
44 Great Russell St, WC1B 3JL
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Email: Hello@subtitlelabs.com
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