25.10.2025 – 8.11.2025

Preview Thursday 23.10.2025

Ben Joiner

Ben Joiner’s practice explores sculptural process and form. Works have involved casting and evisceration, fabrication and simulation.

Joiner’s approach encapsulates — through a process of abstraction — the formative and experiential. 

Works relate to absence and presence, and are an attempt to make palpable connections between these contrasting experiences. 

A number of sculptures have been incorporated into location based films, a series titled ‘Between the shadow and the reflection’. 

Each film records the dropping and subsequent destruction of a piece of work. Shot in slow motion, the films extend the time between release and impact. The resulting footage is both documentation and representation. 

The videos capture anticipation and expectation — the expected impact and the inevitable damage — and explore the processes of production and destruction and present the possibility of restoration.

https://www.benjoinersculptor.co.uk

Nikola Ukic

Through his exploration of materials and forms, Ukić creates space for the uncontrollable. Rather than encouraging us to change the world through direct messages, he invites us to change the way we perceive it. At a time when art often serves as a form of social analysis, his work reminds us that true freedom does not lie in choosing sides but in the ability to endure contradiction.

In Ukić’s works, there is a struggle for the body and its identity or identities. His sculptures are often trunk-like structures that seem to lack extremities. In humans, the extremities act as the movement apparatus and thus as executor of their actions. The human torso, however, is the seat of the organs, of the collection and exchange of energy, the inner or hidden propulsion of all activities. Its arching and contracting are the basic activities of life. The to and fro of this movement routine is articulated by Ukić’s sculptures. They engage the artist’s body and the viewer’s to wrestle with the emerging body in a kind of fictional interaction and at the same time as an artificial natural process. Several ambivalences emerge from this struggle: the ambivalence between an intrinsic and a random becoming of a form, the sensory signs of heaviness and at the same time the lightness or even weightlessness of the resulting structure. Is the expansion of the emerging shape free of gravity in the course of its execution, can it free itself from a reference to the ground? If we look purely at the surfaces, this lack of gravity seems to be prevalent. This is the reason why Ukić sometimes only works with surfaces, with foil as something barely tangible, its thinness as a sign of voidance, which is often intended to protect surfaces in our world of goods, but is itself negligently thrown away. Ukić also raises the question of the carrier material of the foil and its value. In order to be able to remove films, intermediate layers are sometimes required that appear negligible because they are only made for the brief moment of removal. Ukić is interested here in the level on which meaning is created: on the tangible level of materiality or on an intangible intermediate level?

By concentrating on surfaces, he also focuses on the tautness of human skin. In many of his sculptures, there is on the one hand the plumpness that stems from expansion, and at the same time a brittleness at the joints or kinking edges, which also comes about through expansion. One might think that Ukić is concerned here with the deconstruction of the medium in general. However, he is fascinated when in a process something completely different gets transported and conveyed.

Excerpt Rolf Hengesbach

https://www.nikola-ukic.com/