Thomas Erben Gallery is pleased to present Unfurled, an exhibition of works by Opal Ecker DeRuvo, Kara Güt, Sharon Yaoxi He, Fiza Khatri, and Andreia Santana, curated by the gallery’s Anthony Terzino, on view from July 13 through August 4, 2023. Embracing a wide range of mediums from photography, video, painting, and sculpture, unfurled explores the notion of history as a fluid, non-formalized entity. How might individual positions illuminate the ebb and flow of history to upend existing structures — or at the very least, devise a way out? Attention is drawn to the politics of subjectivity and knowing as they intersect with objects, bodies, and spiritual entities.

Opal Ecker DeRuvo uses lasers, frequency generators, and strobe lights to question photography’s role in structuring scientific knowledge and the collapsing of subjects into flattened identities in order to perform new gender subjectivities.

Kara Güt mixes image-based and digital media into virtual worlds to shape new forms of human intimacy. Using the mod “Immersive Lover’s Comfort” by flexcreator, Güt distorts the intended narrative of a role-playing game, opening up a multiplicity of identities that are possible at any given moment, and in any given character.

Meticulously constructed, Sharon Yaoxi He’s abstract paintings reveal and simultaneously conceal spatialities translated from Chinese landscape painting in a continued unfolding of architectural space, gesturing to what a painting never captures, never knows, and never can show.

Informed by the ethos and politics of feminist and queer space-making in Pakistan, Fiza Khatri’s paintings draw from taxidermy specimens found in museum ethnographies as well as poetic and sacred traditions to construct new fictions between the invented and the real.

Andreia Santana’s glass sculptures, cast from relics, debris, and wildlife affixed onto scaffold-like structures, appropriate techniques of archaeology to draw attention to the forgotten. Additionally, her ironed-out fish glue sculptures explore the use of this material and associated ritual practices that link the real to the supernatural.