Exhibition text by Nastia Svarevska

Exhibition floor plan & Acknowledgments

On Kupfer's website
On ACME's website

Press release

Groundwork marks the culmination of a year-long residency as part of Acme’s Early Career Programme, featuring the works of Sam Meredith, Anouk Verviers, Joseph Ijoyemi, and Anna Malicka. Spanning three levels of Kupfer, the exhibition presents site-specific interventions that respond to the building’s architecture, rooting each artist’s practice in a shared space while carving out distinct identities—reflecting their experiences of sharing a studio over the past year.

In the basement, Anouk Verviers’ video installation We Gather at Dawn (I Have Discharged You from Our Care) extends the idea of groundwork to the body, exploring the resilience and resistance of women living with endometriosis. Through a feminist science-fiction lens, Verviers invites us into a dystopian world where a group of chronically ill women create, dismantle, and rebuild columns from cob - a traditional blend of clay, sand, and hay, mixed by their own stomping feet. Their labour, marked by cycles of construction and deconstruction, is both a rejection of societal demands for productivity and a ritual of kinship. It embodies the constant negotiation of endurance and fragility. Verviers’ pavilions - delicate structures of plywood, survival blankets, and insulation - stand precariously in this space, pointing to the fragility of the body while evoking the defiance inherent in working against its limitations. Here, groundwork represents collective survival, where physical labour challenges bodily limitations and embraces mutual care.

Read the full exhibition text by Nastia Svarevska

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