To be ‘enmeshed’ is to be entangled or immersed. Mesh itself can also be a knitted or woven textile, or an interwoven network. In this exhibition, mesh represents a non-chronological, non-linear mode of sharing information.

Feminist practices can usefully be understood as an expansive network of counter-hegemonic resistance; they work to disrupt, dismantle, and reimagine the existing status quo. Plural and intersectional, feminist practices value multiplicity, rejecting the idea of a universal perspective. Institutions such as libraries, archives and museums are governed by certain systems for organising knowledge, and feminist practices involve disrupting these systems to understand what we are prioritising, and why.

In Enmeshed, artists Julia Holderness, Areez Katki, Erica van Zon, Ana Iti, and Claudia Kogachi each reframe narratives, whether they be personal, cultural, or archival. Stories are rewritten from new perspectives, engaging with plurality, temporality, and embodiment – principles that reject a chronological or linear approach. Archival truths are questioned, and personal histories are entwined with fictions. Engaging with narratives born from archives, films, popular culture and personal histories, these artists retell their chosen stories from a feminist perspective. They critique the frameworks taken for granted as being ‘neutral’ by challenging prescribed structures of organising knowledge to alter how people discover, engage with and interpret narratives.

Main image: Areez Katki, Eshq-e Haqiqi (Genuflexion), detail, 2024, cotton embroidery on remnant cloth. Courtesy of the artist and Tim Melville Gallery. Photo credit: Sam Hartnett

Left image: Ana Iti, A dusty handrail on the track, 2021, Single-channel HD video, colour, sound, duration 10 mins 56 secs