Bora Akinciturk, Maksud Ali Mondal, Honey Baker, DaddyBears, Doron Beuns, Ernest Bessems, Lily Bloom, Szilvia Bolla, Kate Burling, Šimon Chovan, Jamie John Davies, Folkert De Jong, Necker Doll, Leon Scott-Engel, Phoebe Evans, Ella Fleck, Max Otis King, K.T., Kobel, Anna-Lena Krause, Nataliya Zuban, Harry Hugo Little, Andrei Nițu, Tomasz Skibicki, Bregje Sliepenbeek & Salomé Wu

22nd November - 7th December, 2024

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"To be vigilant is to be immersed in the texture of time, a corporeal way of grasping the present through the very decay of presence."

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, (1968)

A Foreword by Curator Isabella Greenwood

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘vigil’ as a period of wakefulness, typically observed between death and burial when people watch over the sick or mourn the deceased. To keep vigil is to engage in an embodied confrontation with mortality, asserting the very precarity of one’s own existence in the face of another’s passing. Derived from the Latin vigilia, meaning ‘wakefulness’ or ‘watch,’ the act of keeping vigil is paradoxically marked by depletion: in keeping watch, or staying awake, we become increasingly dissociated. Keeping vigil, and other post-mortem practices articulate cultural values: destigmatising decay while affirming identity and symbolic continuity.

If wakefulness has the potential to be inherently depleting, then, how do we actively keep vigil in our own lives, both figuratively and literally. What does it mean to closely, and attentively, observe all aspects of transmutation and where does our inherent fear of staying ‘awake’ and observing death arise from? The concept of death bears both literal and symbolic resonance, though in both forms, the meaning is the same– something is discarded, metamorphosed, creating something new. Despite historical and religious injunctions that have long framed death as an ultimate passage, whether to an afterlife or oblivion, contemplation of what happens after death is either approached with curiosity, fear or avoided altogether.

Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics, that death has been relegated to the margins of civic space, stripped of its ritual potency, and subordinated to a biopolitical logic that seeks to manage and obscure mortality. The Western aversion to death becomes a symptom of our attempts to regulate meaning through life’s predictable cycles in fear that death might render obsolete the assurances through which we orient our lives. By evading the spectre of death and its accompanying abstractions, we elude the very essence of the vigil itself, and thus, to keep vigil, is a radical interruption—a refusal to let the symbolic order quietly assimilate death into the banal structures of modernity. It is of course, easier to live as though dying were an abstract form, when in reality, to live with the awareness of our inevitable death, and hopeful lives thereafter, is deeply life-affirming.

It is within this avoidance that Vigil: Death and the Afterlife finds its conceptual genesis. This exhibition engages in an aesthetic dialectic with mortality, alternate realities, and speculative afterlives, challenging viewers to position themselves as active witnesses. Merleau-Ponty suggests that our engagement with time, particularly through rituals like vigils, is not merely cognitive but somatic—anchored in our very corporeality. The body is therefore not a passive medium but an active participant, so when we keep vigil, our physical presence becomes an assertion of resistance against the inevitable dissolution of the self. Thus, the vigil, both within the context of the exhibition and lived experience, is less about observation ('watching over') but more about active engagement (being with). Through curated spaces that evoke mourning and metamorphosis, the audience is invited to inhabit the role of the mourner, bearing witness to existential transmutations and contemplating their own threshold of liminality. The show emerges as a site of speculative mourning, exploring the contours of a reality beyond the confines of normative temporality and spatiality. It confronts the ways we orient ourselves towards or away from the uncanny presence of death—either recoiling in fear or leaning into its spectral logic.

I. Towards the Afterlife: Corporeal Decay

The first chapter, Towards the Afterlife, invites the viewer to confront the initial stages of departure from earthly life, focusing on bodily decay. The works compel contemplation on the pre-mortem state—a liminal realm that is neither fully human nor yet spirit, where one exists in a condition of partial withdrawal from the mortal sphere while not yet subsumed by what lies beyond.

Traditionally, the immediate aftermath of death has been a locus of both physical decomposition and profound metaphysical transformation, where the body begins its irreversible descent into rot, as the spirit is believed to commence its journey into the unknown. Though flesh is taxonomically human, in death, flesh belongs to the realm of the carcass or the corpse, its discursive cultural signification, inseparable from its former vitality.

The show has been curated to mimic the process of flesh, to decay, that proceeds corporeal transcendence with works from being confronted with Harry Hugo Little’s work of an x-rayed blue man, framed at the centre of the shows opening curtains, alongside KT Kobel’s fallen woman, who collapses above a ledge of lost trinkets: a key (which bares the inscription: ‘when the absence is as voluptuous as presence’), an oyster, gloves and a pack of cigarettes. Continuing through the exhibition, Ella Fleck’s breathing sheet holds the outline of a sleeping body, Max Otis King’s Votive Watching plays the least streamed funeral processions on YouTube live near Folkert De Jong’s scattered open casket neon tombs, Jamie John Davies’ rotting death. Leon Scott-Engel’s flesh inscribed mattresses are situated between chrome calcified organs, and a loop streamed funerary processions. The exhibition underscores the paradox inherent in this state: a simultaneous unravelling of the flesh and elevation of the spirit.

The corpse, bearing a referential relationship to an absent subject, is taken up into a variety of assemblages that produce the effect of memory, legacy and inheritance. In this sense the corpse is a fleshy relics or archives: one that lives perceptible traces, that we seek to follow. Visitors are invited to position themselves as psychopomps—those who navigate the deceased—walking in parallel with these mythic beings as they move through a space that collapses the boundary between the corporeal and the incorporeal. Towards the Afterlife, situates the viewer as both witness and participant in this transition, preparing them for the subsequent immersion into deeper and more unsettling visions of the afterlife.

II. The Liminal Realm

The second chapter, The Liminal Realm, centres on the moment of death and the mythic waiting period that follows—From Drawing on the iconographies of classical mythology, Christian eschatology, and ancient Egyptian beliefs, the works in this chapter portray bodies and objects in a state of inter mundia—suspended between worlds as they wait deliberation past the gates of heaven. In religious contexts, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy or Christian purgatory, this phase is understood as a testing ground where souls are cleansed, tormented, or redeemed, awaiting their final judgement.

Bodies, suspended, must begin their travel Bregje Sliepenbeek’s large chrome gates. As their bodies break down ahead of the descent, skin boils and fragmented, as limbs disintegrate into pearly violet matter becoming otherworldly topographies. The body transcends its fleshy chamber, leaving behind remnants of its former self: emptied flesh encasements, bones and a black hat. Angels, spirits and ghouls greet the traveller on their journey, offering equal amounts of equal terror and delight.

Not only exploring the journey towards the afterlife, this chapter also seeks to engage more broadly with our cultural fascination with the liminoid—spaces which are simultaneously real and imagined, where normal structures of meaning are suspended, allowing for temporary and transformative experiences. These imagined realms: gates of heaven, purgatory and liminal realms, astral bodies, reflect our own persistent need to categorise and control the unknowable, suggesting that liminality is not merely an interstitial state but an entire spectrum of possible experiences.

The section includes works from: Kate Burling, Daddy Bears’s satin bed, Anna-Lena Krause’ astral body ascending out of itself, Lily Bloom’s chrome-thorned deer, Ernest Bessem’s unwound ram, alongside Andrei Nitu’s bronze bracelet, a circlette to new realms, alongside Honey Baker’s suspended resin orchid. Through a curation that moves the viewer from shadowy, labyrinthine paths to open, radiant spaces, the exhibition evokes not only the journey of decent, or moral reckoning, but the existential call of what lies behind the chrome gates, and the disintegration of our own physical bodies.

Bora Akinciturk’s Release Dove leaps towards unknown lands, while Kate Burling’s Study for a Pair of White Lines, featuring a pastel, disembodied split legs marks the way towards Salome Wu’s The Wind Stood Silently, revealing an astral body, extending towards an unknownable sun.

III. Beyond the Afterlife

The concluding chapter, Beyond the Afterlife, shifts the focus from human-centric conceptions of the afterlife to speculative imaginations of a post-human future. Drawing inspiration from contemporary post-human theory, the artworks in this section envision landscapes where biological life has been overtaken by hybrid entities—synthetic nature, and bioengineered organisms that might rise from the ruins of a world abandoned by humans. The aesthetics of these works often mirror the stark, desolate beauty of post-apocalyptic realm where the remnants of civilisation are interwoven with emergent non-human ecologies. By presenting death not as an endpoint but as a catalyst for transformation and regeneration, the works speak to the broader reimagining of life beyond anthropocentrism, and on thinkers like Donna Haraway, whose posthuman Cyborg Manifesto proposes new forms of existence that defy traditional binaries between life and death, organic and synthetic. Our era is marked by the necessity to rethink existence itself in an age of ecological crisis and technological evolution.

In the final chapter, the exhibition gestures towards the radical possibility that life and death might be reconceived as fluctuating patterns of energy, process, and emergence. The speculative, sometimes unsettling works in this section do not offer closure but rather open a space for audiences to confront the profound uncertainties and potentials of a world that could continue without us. In a world where digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and ecological collapse increasingly challenge our anthropocentric worldview, this chapter asks what lies beyond the human experience of death.

The final work that completes the passage, Melle Nieleng’s door shrine, a video of a face lies at the Post-human structures, strands of wires, and leaking mirrors, spill out of their flesh encasement, pointing towards the configuration of perhaps a new life or body–– though it is for the viewer to discern what will become. Tomasz Skibicki’s OH MY GOAT features a duplicate panel of looping videos, a jagged first-person-perspective into stacked coffins, a glaring red screen. Simon Chovin presents ochre pigmented relics of an undiscovered world, fossils post an unknown apocalypse, while Maksud Ali Mondal’s sheets of naturally multiplying bacteria triple into organic patterns over the course of the show. Doron Beuns displays The Impossibility of Nihilism––– an overflowing liquid made up of the shreddings of the artists’ self portrait––– stands alongside Natalyia Zuban’s coexistence, a dystopian coral reef. Who we are, and who we might become, remain in meaty conflict: rich with carnivorous charge, blood, bones and displaced relics of our former selves. Phoebe Evans’ Omen, a neat stack of candles, is positioned to the left of Melle Nieling’s Beneath the Makers: a shrine featuring artificially generated choir singers, deceased photograph and a door shrouded in candles. The future is presented as jarringly intertwined with artificial possibilities: who we mourn for, hangs in suspension, futures unknown, awaiting judgement, resurrection or honey-shrined rebirth, as Simon Chovin’s suspended chrysalis suggests.

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For all enquiries, please email info@shipton.gallery

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Image 1:
Harry Hugo Little
5YOP, 2024
Oil on wood board,
18 x 16 cm

Image 2:
KT Kobel
When the absence is as voluptuous as the excess, 2024
Acrylic, resin, wood,
100 x 140 x 30 cm

Image 3:
Ella Fleck
When you wish upon a start, 2024
Linen, resin & animated LED,
100 x 60 x 20 cm

Image 4:
Max Otis King
Votive Watching, 2022
Physical Video (Livestream)

Image 5 + 6:
Folkert De Jong
Ancestor 1, (Guillaume), 2023
Ancestor 2, (Cabiliau), 2023
Ancestor 3, (Rembrandts), 2023
Ancestor 4, (Don F), 2023
Ancestor 5, (Diederick), 2023
Acrylglas box
200 x 60 x 60 cm 

Image 7:
Jamie John Davies
Mouth 1, 2022
Mouth 3, 2023
Mouth 6, 2024
Mouth 7, 2024
Mouth 8, 2024
Oil on Linen
25.5 x 20.5 cm

Image 8:
Andrei Nițu
Warm Blooded Organism, 2024
Oil on canvas
175 x 145 cm

Image 9:
Andrei Nițu
Museum Visit, 2023
Oil on canvas
120 x 100 cm 

Image 10:
Leon Scott Engel
You are everything and everything is you, 2024
Oil on tailored linen, foam
100 x 140 x 30 cm

Image 11:
Necker Doll
The Best Of Me (Muerte y Mantia), 2024
Painted polyurethane, rubber, acrylic, ribbon, laces, wood
40 x 45 x 18 cm

Image 12:
Ernest Bessems
Sickle of Envy, 2024
Bronze, black patinated
45 x 27 x 5 cm 

Image 13:
Ernest Bessems
Saw of Lust, 2024
Bronze, black patinated
60 x 22 x 7 cm 

Image 14:
Ernest Bessems
Sheers of Gluttony, 2024
Bronze, black patinated
38 x 12 x 5 cm 

Image 15:
Daddy Bears
Lucid, 2024
Wood, mixed fabrics, hollow fibre stuffing, thread
30 x 57 x 49 cm

Image 16:
Tomasz Skibicki
AHA - ERLEBNIS III, 2018
Handcrafted punching pad made of found coffin fabrics, bleached leather, tie wraps, and dental floss
40 x 30 x 15 cm 

Image 17:
Szilvia Bolla
Rivotril Flowers Fall I (Gag Reflex), 2024
Stereolithography print, calcium and argon in a glass ampule, steel 3D print
35 x 15 x 10 cm (edition of 3)

Image 18:
Lily Bloom
Ask Again, 2024
Porcelain, Magic 8 Ball, Solder
11 x 10 cm + 21 x 16 cm

Image 19:
Anna Lena Krause
I Hold You Together, 2021
Resin, Blue and Yellow Ink
75 x 50 x 60 cm


Image 20:
Bora Akinciturk
Release Dove, 2020
Oil on canvas
50 x 40 cm

Image 21:
Honey Baker
Honey, 2024
Resin
27 x 37 x 28 cm 

Image 22:
Bregje Sliepenbeek
TEMENOS, 2024
Aluminium
420 x 360 x 200 cm

Image 23:
Kate Burling
Study for a Pair of White Lines, 2024
Oil on Wood Panel
40 x 50 cm

Image 24:
Salomé Wu
The Wind Stood Still Silently, 2023
Oil on canvas
55 x 95 cm

Simon Chovan
Hedgehog’s Dilemma, 2024
Jesmonite, foraged iron oxide, burlap, glass fibre
Variable dimensions

Image 25:
Melle Nieling
Beneath the Markers, 2024
Various materials, video
200 x 89 x 40 cm

Image 26:
Nataliya Zuban
Coexistence, 2024
Fired clay, crater glaze, pigments
30 x 67 x 71 cm

Image 27:
Phoebe Evans
Omen, 2024
Oil On Linen
25 x 25 cm

Image 28:
Doron Beuns
The Impossibility of Nihilism, 2021
Steel, polyurethane, PVC, water-decal print, lacquer
80 x 52 x 170 cm

Image 29:
Maksud Ali Mondal
Synthesis, 2024
Chlorophyll on glass and Light
140 cm / 110 cm (each glass) 

Simon Chovan
Hedgehog’s Dilemma, 2024
Jesmonite, foraged iron oxide, burlap, glass fibre
Variable dimensions

Doron Beuns
The Impossibility of Nihilism, 2021
Steel, polyurethane, PVC, water-decal print, lacquer
80 x 52 x 170 cm