Desire as a method of making

Exhibition

Desire is often treated as subject matter: something represented by a body, an object or an image. Sarabande’s summer group show proposes a more useful reading. Across two parts—Anatomy of Looking and Against Disappearance—desire becomes a process of seeking and projection, a movement towards something that cannot yet be fully named.

Curatorial approach

The exhibition brings together artists completing a year in Sarabande’s studios. That context matters. A residency group show can easily become administrative—a summary of outputs produced during a fixed period. Framing the work through desire shifts attention from completion to momentum. What matters is not simply what has been made, but what each practice is trying to approach.

Desire gives the unfinished work a direction without demanding a destination.

Artists

The twenty-three residents include Anna-Lena Krause, Furmaan Ahmed, Jingyi Li, Bisila Noha, Taiba Akhuetie and Siphiwe-Nokukhanya Mnguni. The editorial question is not whether they share a style, but whether the group format leaves enough room for each practice to make its own account of desire.

The two-part structure also introduces a productive tension. Looking can possess, classify and turn its subject into an image. Refusing disappearance, meanwhile, can be an act of persistence: a demand to remain visible within systems that distribute attention unevenly. Between those positions, the exhibition’s title holds desire open as both vulnerability and agency.

There is a broader institutional question here. Emerging artists are routinely asked to articulate a coherent identity before their methods have had time to change. A show about desire offers another measure of seriousness—one based on sustained inquiry rather than polished certainty.

The result is a framework that values the provisional. It suggests that an artwork may be most alive not when it announces what it is, but when it makes legible the distance it still wants to travel.