Ritual Eternal

02.08.—
13.09.25

SHEN LIEYI. Rain 2001-. Granite over carbon fibre. 47 x 82 x 109cm (detail)

Ritual Eternal brings together artists whose practices engage with ways of knowing, perceiving and experiencing the world that sit outside prevalent language systems and epistemologies. Drawing from diverse traditions—sacred, secular, ancestral and subcultural—the works in this exhibition seek to expand conceptions of ritual, transcendence and the limits of more familiar forms of transmission.

The title, Ritual Eternal, suggests both continuity and transformation, evoking traditions that endure while shapeshifting across time and cultural contexts. Through varied forms and media, the artists in this exhibition variously consider the unheard and unsayable, not as an absence or deficit, but rather as forms of potentiality or transcendence. From engaging with ancestral knowledges, embodied spiritual practices or expanded states of consciousness, these works all foreground sometimes overlooked modes of perception.

Throughout history, artists, philosophers and knowledge-keepers alike have sought ways to communicate experiences that exceed the outer limits of rational thought. Indeed, in many traditions, knowledge is passed on through gesture, sound, materiality and embodied practice rather than through written word. The works in Ritual Eternal embrace such multiplicities of knowing by inviting us to step beyond of traditional forms of language and interpretation and into spaces of indeterminacy, transcendence, resonance or relationality.

Rather than positioning the ineffable as necessarily intangible or unknowable, this exhibition reminds us that meanings can emerge through attunement, intuition, memory and interconnection. Through this multifaceted spirit of human engagements with the vastness of all that is, was, and will be, Ritual Eternal invites viewers to consider how diverse artistic and cultural practices might cultivate new ways of sensing, understanding and experiencing the profoundness of being in the world.

Curated by Cūrā8 (Kim Donaldson and Sean Lowry) and featuring:

Fu Xiaodong

Treahna Hamm

Veronika Hauer & Katie Lee

Huang Qiuyuan

Alicia King

Tristan Liao

Lai Yin

Sorcha MacKenzie

Mao Chenyu

Noriko Nakamura

Eva Richardson