Sequestered Spaces

Sequestered Spaces - Fleeting Light

Curator: Beverley Harrison

We construct sequestered spaces, safe havens in which the Self can reside, whether in urban architectures, landscapes or within our minds. These spaces become concrete reflections and extensions of the Self, cultural identity and socio-political milieus. Faris Nakamura and Bunga Yuridespita's sculptural architectural forms explore these implications for identity, rendering tangible the intangible. What are the experiential nuances of public and private space?

In collaborative tandem, Faris Nakamura and Bunga Yuridespita's illusory architectural paintings and intermedia artworks explore urban spatial nuances, querying how social and personal spaces intertwine, function and are experienced. Their formally abstracted architectural works open a dialogue on sequestered, liminal spaces of light, shadow and colour. Colourful sculptural paintings, performance and filmic media trouble Western one point perspective, presenting multiple vantage points and sightlines. Spatial ambiguity unfolds, to convey uncertain thresholds between secure and tenuous ways of being. The artworks' titles spawn elusive narratives, so an unanswerable riddle spans the gallery.

A Soft Space Opened Where None Was Promised, 2026 is a new collaborative work by Faris Nakamura and Bunga Yuridespita. Nakamura restages his freestanding skyscraper-like sculpture. Yuridespita's filmic media Dance of Dimensions, 2024, streams into Nakamura's two white wooden twin towers' apartment-like interiors. The interior is visible through a waist high horizontal strip of glass. The filmic projection simulates moving light and shadow throughout the sculpture's interior spaces. Fleetingly, it flashes an illusion of internal movement throughout hallways and generic living spaces.

The light projection choreographs a haptic spatial illusion within the sculptures' spaces. It spills outward to create a geometric pattern onto the plinth and floor. A unity between the sculptures and the gallery occurs. The gallery's affect when darken is that of geometric puzzle pieces on the floor. This puzzle piece affect is echoed in the sculptures and paintings throughout the gallery, which are constructed of interlocking pieces, assemblages of geometric shapes.

 The projector's external filmic gaze imprints the sculptures and our minds' architectures. We imagine an internal reality within the sculptures. Through spatial interpretation, we try to piece together an undisclosed narrative, connoted by the atmosphere's uncanny familiarity, yet strangeness. The sculpture's hard-edged austerity yet ethereal isolation contrasts with Yuridespita's everyday film images with a silenced soundscape of doors opening, dogs barking and footsteps. Thus, the sculpture haunts in its disquieting homeliness and detached observational distancing. 

Nakamura views the A Soft Space Opened Where None Was Promised as a protective refuge, for these sensory everyday images and silent sounds. However, as we bend to peer inside, we imagine personal and interpersonal social scenarios unfolding. We ask ourselves whether peeking through structural gaps and crevices signals psychologists Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud's Scopophilia- a titillating glee in illicit looking - voyeurism. Alternatively, could our gaze be that of surveillance, like the Panopticon's omnipresent gaze of political power, control and censure, described by philosopher Michel Foucault, in reference to prisons and all-pervasive urban cameras. Of this, Nakamura states, "The limited vantage point frames the viewer as voyeur, evoking the very tension between visibility and vulnerability that queer individuals experience when navigating public space."[1] Yet, looking closely is the point, for it garners visitors' attentiveness to societal spatial nuances, and the intersplicing of personal, collective and socio-political structures. What power relations lie within these architectures?

Nakamura's geometric, monochromatic wall sculptures have minimalistic façades that conceal configured internal architectural spaces, with windows, stairs and corridors. The facades' abstracted organic shapes combine both human and non-human forms. They signify the interconnectivity of all living beings. We look closely at the hidden spaces behind, to analyse their characteristics. Are these spaces places of refuge or avenues of escape? Their atmosphere is conveyed by light, shadow, and deeply saturated colour - metaphorically and figuratively.  Nakamura's shadow-casting sculptures choreograph a microcosm, a series of architectures, within the macrocosm of the gallery's architectural space.

Likewise, as an architect, Yuridespita integrates architecture, into her illusionist architectural paintings and performances. Her performance video I Did, 2026, is reflected in her architectural body sculpture and her wall mural of acrylic mirrors that stand opposite her film in the gallery. I Did, 2026, is Yuridespita's playful filmic performance intervention into urban and rural landscapes. It acquires an interplay across the gallery with Nakamura's sculptures. Like many of her colourful cubist-like body sculptures, it contains frames with mirrors that reflect sites outdoors then indoors in galleries. The body sculptures' frames connote console screens and query the lens by which we perceive realities.

Yuridespita staged a body sculpture performance The Unfamiliar Familiar, 2026, to activate interconnectedness between herself as performing artist, the audience, artworks and the gallery's space. The performance includes a durational component, wherein Yuridespita interacts lyrically with the artworks. Part dance, part walking, part stumbling, she traverses the gallery, physically conveying her story. Dance-like, she flows through lighting projections that create geometric shapes on the floor, within and surrounding A Soft Space Opened Where None Was Promised, 2026. The gallery is darkened, so Dance of Dimensions, 2024, when paused, castes light shapes, to transform the gallery's illuminated daylit clarity into evening's liminal atmospheric shadows.

Midway through her performance, Yuridespita dawns her body sculpture, with the aid of Nakamura. The sculpture perched on its legs stands before her acrylic mirrored site-specific wall mural in one corner of the gallery. At this point, a soundtrack recounts the narrative from I Did, her film opposite, which reflects into the mural. The mirrored frames of the body sculpture reflect the audience, as well as the artworks, as she moves, images everchanging, multidirectional in coloured frames.  Visitors see other visitors, themselves and artworks as she passes, creating interconnectivity and equanimity in how we view of ourselves and others. Literally and metaphorically, we see all the angles and perspectives.

When the body sculpture is not on, it stands on a black tripod, as though standing on thin legs - architectonically totemic.  In her film I Did 2026, Yuridespita performs in this body sculpture outdoors. The body sculpture worn in The Unfamiliar Familiar, 2026, is an artifact from the I Did, 2026 outdoor performance video. Thus, the performance has been restaged in a new reiteration for this collaborative exhibition with Nakamura. Thus, performance and gallery curation create a synergy between their two artistic practices and a shifting atmosphere within the gallery space. Moreover, the gallery becomes a scenography, a space in which a performance occurs, which is also an immersive space in which both the performer and audience reside. 

I Did's soundscape recounts the artist's internal dialogue on how cultural-psychological lonely displacement lapses progressively into adaptive kinship, as she wanders from place to place.  In this outside-gallery performance, Yuridespita wears a body sculpture which reflects, not only the environment, but also the milieu's social fabric of estrangement, association or interconnectedness. Environments seem ubiquitously placeless. As seen in Lihong Bai's Outsider, in the previous exhibition Fluid Architectures Poetics of the Self, Yuridespita's I Did recounts diasporic wanderings, framed as heterotopic. Like Nakamura's works, visitors experience a sense of displacement and surreal uncanniness.

 Yuridespita's paintings present architectural trompe l'oeil. They play with perspective. Geometric forms and colour illusions create imaginative architectures, often as part of the gallery's architecture. The First Chapter: The Very Start, 2026 confounds perspective, using distorted geometric forms and perspectival points, to construct architectures that seem to fold into each other yet expand. Visitors become temporarily engrossed in deciphering the artwork's architectural perspectives and forms, questioning architectural structures' solidity and in turn societal structures. Like Baroque wall paintings, these mural-like artworks play with space, querying reality's surfaces and what lies beyond appearances, generally and in terms of architectural spaces. Where do illusions lie? How do we look closely and experience with our senses, in search of what is true or authentic, whether in society or ourselves. Both her performances and paintings explore uncanny estrangement yet unfolding interconnectedness, drawing the visitor into perspectival questioning, literally and figuratively.

Likewise, in Where the Edges Remember and The Weight of Somewhere, 2026, Nakamura explores "architecture as a language through which memory, shelter and belonging can be understood." These two works form a diptych-like work with a gap between. This continuity imbricates the gallery's space.  They "resemble fragments of an architectural structure suspended between solidity and absence." These institutionally imposing structures assert societal authority, yet are pieces reflecting each other, with openings and concealed spaces of safety and retreat, "this tension between visibility and concealment…can shape our sense of safety and belonging."[2] In the gap between the two works, art gallery spaces become implicated in this discourse, creating an institutional critique, yet a commentary on the art gallery's sequestered spaces, as one's of refuge and safety.

Where the Edges Remember and The Weight of Somewhere, 2026, unfold geometric shapes that caste prismatic shadows, within the works' interiors, as well as onto the works' facades and the gallery walls. They are prismatic in their crystalline purity. The Edges Remember's olive green shapes fold inward, on a negative diagonal; whereas The Weight of Somewhere's light teal blue balconies are external and protrude outward in a positive diagonal. I peek behind Where Edges Remember, searching for what might be remembered. I see a gateway or bannister before a hallway. At the end is a door to somewhere, if only I could walk up a ramp or stairwell. Is the door locked, if not where does it lead? Another stairwell ends in a fenced-like blockade, yet I see freedom opening on the other side. A mirror on this stairwell reflects what is inside - blocked vistas, or viewed obliquely, a sliver of what stands outside in the gallery.

In The Weight of Somewhere, 2026, three balcony like facades, seem to create an impenetrable structure, with closed openings. I peer in the left and see a gatelike entrance to a corridor and a unmountable slide-like corridor. The right side has a bannister on the balcony, a stairwell with a door that leads to a corridor with a precipice-like dead drop or diving point. In the centre of the sculpture, this corridor has a mirror, a stair, yet a gate that looks onto an open vista beyond, unattainable, denying access. Shadows and light intersplice, as do openings and enclosures, exits with no exit.

The Glimmer Beneath Carapace Façade, 2026, evinces puzzle-like symmetrical precision, yet the aubergine - purple organic forms, are reminiscent of flower pods or insect shells. When we look behind the façade, we see open vistas on each side, experiencing a sense of hope and freedom. Yet, we imagine a bit of an obstacle race, a walk upstairs, a ramp and a hop over a bannister, into thin air. However, the other entrances, while open seem inaccessible except through visual openings. The windows are unmirrored, so do not see beyond the confines. And the ceilings seem to descend into the corridors. Yet, from the side, the openings are funnelling, telescope-like peering outside. Nakamura views this work as exploring the dual nature of facades as protective shields and barriers. Therefore, visitors are invited to query urban spaces' experiential nuances, psychological impacts, and how that effects public and private social interactions, as well as personal identity.

In Shade of Shelter, Held Within, 2026, deep blood red signifies the emotions that one experiences, whether "vulnerability or resilience" within homely domiciles and public urban spaces that "feel inhabited yet inaccessible." The façade's curvaceous circular forms echo human and non-human bodies, as do the colours. The symmetry yet slightly off centred asymmetry create a lyrical movement within the sculpture's nonetheless architectonic structure. It's internal corridors, windows and stairs create a rhythmic internal movement, enticing visitors to conjure "intimate associations and memories." Internal passageways seem open, rhythmically flowing within and outside the sculpture.  Internal windows mirror the outside and inside, flickering light. In the centre, a bannister eludes to a balcony, yet the vista is the gallery's white wall. Thus, visitors imaginatively enter these interiors, anticipating opening onto an exit, an unknown destination, yet are foiled.

Folding into Light's, 2026, greenness and curvaceously fluid rhythms signify unfolding growth, the protective repose of foliage and calm, an "internal landscape shaped by memory…something living that changes with us and continues to grow." The façade is symmetrical with curves and slightly off centred elements, creating variations in similar forms that catch the eye, creating a flow around the sculpture from one form to another, exploiting line's subtleties and lyrical qualities. In the architecture behind, we look freely through the sculpture, our eye running upstairs and over bannisters, in one end and out the other, from either side. However, the window reflects the interiors and the door seems squat, causing us to stop and question reality, yet the flow carries us away to freedom.

Therefore, Nakamura's works convey subtle variations and open discourse on how we perceive spaces, societal architectures and places, in relation to personal and societal perceptions of identity. Once again, we think of Foucault's distinction between emplacements and heterotopias and the gradients thereof. For example, emplacements are coherent types of spaces in society, like cafes, movie theatres and transit, all linked to other societal yet distinct places. In contrast, utopias and heterotopias are placeless places that illicit a mirror-like displacement of the Self, within a societal space. They are set apart from everyday societal spaces, as in a cemetery or garden. Heterotopias juxtapose several incompatible emplacements into a single real space, as in a theatrical stage with a succession of places.[3] These artists' works echo Michel Foucault's philosophical studies on heterotopias, yet also address not only their portrayals, but also the intangible psychological states and ways of being that they engender.

"Either the heterotopias have the role of creating a space of illusion that denounces all real spaces, all real emplacements [cafes, theatres, galleries] within which life is partitioned off, as being even more illusory…Or on the contrary, creating a different space, a different real space as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorganized, badly arranged and muddled."[4]

Combined, Yuridespita and Nakamura's works discourse how societal architectures reflect socio-political spatial allocations and cultural attitudes. In turn, individuals carve out safe spaces. Nonetheless, they are continually impacted and defined, while sequestering refuge, within these spaces.  In this sense, their works explore Foucauldian heterotopias and emplacements, places apart yet within society. Where and how do we find ways of inhabiting spaces, to protect and harbour the Self?

The nuances of architecture and the nature of spaces are explored, as we observe these artworks' configurations. By looking closely, we explore our own stories and shifting perceptions. As well, we experience these works' physicality, while exploring their uncertain passageways through unknown places. We probe societal urban and personal spaces' character. In so doing, we imagine potential personal, socio-cultural and intercultural narratives, in relation to place. Is the space inclusionary, exclusionary, a place of refuge, isolation, acceptance or scrutiny?

Artists' Social Media:

Faris Nakamura

https://www.farisnakamura.com/

https://www.instagram.com/faris.nakamura

Bunga Yuridespita

 https://www.bungayuridespita.com/

Photos courtesy of Polo Farrera