Group exhibition by
Gülce Tulçalı, Anastasia Belinskaya, Kika Sroka-Miller, Syntheticduo, Harry Payne
Curated by Anzhela Popova and Nathan Yeomans
Private Viewing: Thursday 8 October, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition Dates: 9 – 30 October 2026
Opening Hours: by appointment
Location: 13 Ramsgate Street, E8 2FD, London
The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know it times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never.
Jacques Derrida ‘Archive Fever’
Commencement/Commandment takes Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever as a point of departure to consider the archive not as fixed or linear, but as something continually disturbed and re-negotiated. Bringing together works by Anastasia Belinskaya, Gülce Tulçalı, Kika Sroka-Miller, Synthetic Studio and Harry Payne, the exhibition considers the archive through different registers: material, technological, speculative and personal. Across the exhibition, these different forms do not aim to present a complete or chronological history. Instead, they point towards an archive made up of fragments: things preserved and things lost, things that can be accessed and others that remain out of reach.
For Derrida, the impulse to preserve is never entirely separate from the possibility of loss. An archive is thereby shaped not only by what enters it, but by what remains outside, who is able to access it, and how its contents come to be read later on. In this sense, an archive does not simply tell us what happened. Rather, it participates in producing the conditions through which something may become history at all. This feels particularly relevant now, when the act of recording has become almost constant: photographs, surveillance, scrolling, data and digital traces are produced at a speed that increasingly complicates what might constitute evidence, memory or even truth.
The works in Commencement/Commandment approach this problem from notably different positions. Anastasia Belinskaya works with coal, quartz, aluminium and ice, treating matter itself as something capable of holding histories that extend far beyond a human lifespan. Geological material itself becomes a kind of record, carrying within it histories of extraction, climate and transformation. Gülce Tulçalı brings the question of the archive much closer to the technologies through which contemporary life is observed and circulated. Through surveillance imagery and digitally connected systems, her work asks what happens when our bodies and actions are being recorded almost as they occur: when the archive begins to form before we have chosen what, if anything, should be remembered.