Private Viewing: Thursday 29 October, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition Dates: 30 October – 13 November 2026
Opening Hours: by appointment
Location: Arc Space, 13 Tottenham Mews, London W1T 4AQ
What does it mean to care for something that cannot be restored?
Power to Care considers care as a way of inhabiting history: not through preservation alone, nor through the promise of repair, but through sustained attention to what history leaves behind.
“History is what hurts,” Fredric Jameson writes in The Political Unconscious (1981). History, in this sense, is not confined to the past. It persists through its effects – through bodies, materials, inherited narratives, domestic rituals and the structures that delimit what can be remembered, imagined or transformed.
Care begins within these conditions.
It begins when something interrupts indifference and asks us to remain: with a body, an image, a material, a memory, a place; with something fragile, unresolved or already disappearing. Yet attention is never immaterial. To care is to expend time, labour and resources. It is to enter into relations of responsibility whose burdens are neither equally visible nor equally distributed.
Power to Care therefore resists the reduction of care to tenderness or moral virtue. Here, care is understood as a practice of duration. It is repetitive, embodied and frequently invisible. It can sustain, but it can also exhaust. It can be chosen, inherited or imposed.
Across the practices of Anna Samoylova and Zulfiya Spowart, textile becomes a site through which these contradictions are made material.
Samoylova works with raw calico, hand embroidery, painting and printmaking to approach motherhood as a lived structure of care rather than an idealised image. Repetitive stitching registers attachment alongside fatigue, intimacy alongside ambivalence. Folkloric and mythological forms are repeatedly assembled and unsettled, turning the textile surface into an archive in which personal memory intersects with inherited cultural histories.
The labour of the hand is central. A stitch is both mark and duration: evidence that time has been given.
Spowart likewise approaches material as a carrier of memory, while questioning whether inheritance can ever amount to preservation. In Sun, Air and Water – Our Best Friends, she returns to a mosaic created during the Soviet era, still preserved within a functioning kindergarten in Tashkent. Translated through hand-stitched linen, reclaimed fabrics, iron oxidation and soft sculptural forms, the image is neither reconstructed nor returned to an imagined original condition. Instead, it undergoes another history. It fades. It migrates. It oxidises. It enters different bodies and environments.
Across both practices, inheritance emerges not as the passive transmission of an intact past, but as an active and unstable process. Materials age. Images detach themselves from their original contexts. Memories are altered by the gestures through which they are carried forward.
Care, from this perspective, does not necessarily mean preventing disappearance. It may instead mean remaining attentive to transformation.
The works gathered in Power to Care do not propose to heal history. Nor do they attempt to reconcile its contradictions. They stay with its traces: with what persists after an image has fragmented, after a political structure has disappeared, after an inherited form has lost the certainty of its original meaning.
Against an economy in which attention is increasingly fragmented, accelerated and commodified, the exhibition insists upon another temporality.
Stitching takes time. Oxidation takes time. Mothering takes time. Remembering takes time. Forgetting takes time. Looking carefully takes time.
These durations are not incidental to the works; they constitute them. Care becomes visible not simply through what is represented, but through the time embedded within matter—the repeated gesture, the altered surface, the image allowed to fade.
Power to Care asks what becomes perceptible when we remain with something long enough for its contradictions to appear.
Perhaps the power of care lies precisely here: not in keeping things intact, but in refusing indifference to their transformation.
To care is to decide that something – however vulnerable, unresolved or transient – is worthy of our time.