(It is Necessary to) Learn to Swim traces the porous boundary between memory, myth and the quiet dread of a world reshaping itself. The exhibition takes its title from a boatbuilding text, folding together the legacy of a story long used to steady children, Noah’s Ark, with the psychological and physical projections we cast onto vessels of rescue. Animalistic sculptural offerings, moving-image works and photography form a constellation of gestures that drift between the imagined and the material. A reading circle with macaques, death casts of cats, a therapy-like exchange and the remnants of stories half-believed accumulate as quietly dissonant scenes.

Anchored by religious narrative, the exhibition returns to the Ark not as a promise of salvation but as an ageing history buckling under contemporary pressure. An intimate voice threads through childhood encounters with rescued animals, hospital rooms and a memory teeming with creatures, revealing how tales meant to soothe can instead plant a soft, persistent dread. Preparation and impossibility sit uneasily together; the vessel is never quite large enough, never quite convincing. Across the exhibition, Valender asks what we carry forward, what slips from our grasp and how we might learn to stay afloat when the stories we inherit can no longer hold us.

18 Generations reflects on ancestry as something that cannot be directly represented, only traced through absence. Ancestors are not imagined as figures that persist in a fixed place or form; their material presence has long since vanished. To search for them as if they still exist is to pursue something already undone. What remains instead are residual forces—carried within the body, encoded, remembered, and misremembered.

Time operates in these paintings as both accumulation and erasure. Surfaces are treated as sites that have been marked, obscured, layered, and revised, echoing the way histories are written and overwritten. The apparent emptiness within the works is not a void but a compression of lived time—where growth, decay, clarity, and obscurity coexist beyond direct observation. Like the passage of life itself, these processes unfold without ever being fully witnessed.

The paintings consider stillness as an active condition. In moments where form dissolves or recedes, stillness becomes a means through which presence can be sensed rather than seen. This tension reflects a human impulse to search for an original foundation or essence, even when such a point of origin may no longer exist.

While all forms are destined to fade, the work asks what it means to forget that which cannot truly be forgotten. Memory is treated not as a personal archive but as a closed system—one in which nothing fully escapes, and everything leaves a trace.

Here, “ancestors” function not as portraits or narratives, but as underlying structures. They precede the individual and extend beyond them, shaping the present through invisible continuity. Although their beginnings and endings remain unknowable, their transmission persists—quietly, materially, and without interruption.

Curated by Kim Donaldson with Jiayang Zhang