A homage to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, this exhibition is a meditation on slow looking and the mechanisms of human perception. Produced during Hands-on’s six-week online residency programme – now in its 3rd edition – it features the works of Laetitzia Campbell, Becca Ellis, Haoua Habré, Fatemeh Heidarhosseini, and Lícia Santos, encompassing painting, installation, and embroidery.

Like the opening lines of Berger’s seminal text – ‘Seeing comes before words’ – perception provides a rational framework for us to view the world and our experiences within it. Filtered through the rose-tinted glasses of our upbringing, accumulated knowledge, and society’s nurtured biases, it rarely offers a truthful account of events. Instead, we are left with an aesthetic experience that is personal and nuanced, where meaning is derived from our own creative thoughts, emotions, and associations. Yet, at times, the collective observations of a community can bring that experience in line with relational art.

Becca Ellis’ paintings of ‘vessels’ seek to capture suspended states between presence and absence. Through conscious manipulation of textures and boundaries, harmony and dissonance with the pictorial space is created, transforming these familiar entities into quiet, omnipotent structures that question our perception of their surroundings.

Meanwhile, Haoua Habré reflects on the body and its relationship with the world of shadows, a projected realm that does not physically exist, yet whose presence cannot be ignored or denied. Her installation examines moments of transition and instability, when a shadow is not fully formed but is already detached from the body, appearing as a symbolic trace of its humanity. In this malleable state, the body is seen as a mobile territory where identity and social memory are literally shaped by their environments.

Fatemeh Heidarhosseini brings this concept to the real world, reflecting on her Iranian heritage and the devastating events that transpired in her hometown of Tehran in early 2026. Her series of small-scale paintings are intended as cinematic parallels to her grieving process, one that is paralysing and overwhelmed by endless trauma, guilt, horror, and anguish. Conceived in three parts, the paintings mimic an establishing shot, pulling out from details of corpses to evocative, gloomy landscapes. None of these scenes are taken from life, resulting in a personal testimony that captures the emotional responses and collective memory of contemporary Iranians.

Finally, presence and being present are the themes underlying Laetitzia Campbell and Lícia Santos’ works. For Santos, the body is perceived as a territory of time. Instead of being measured, time is embodied within oneself; it is felt, held, and eventually released. By interacting with desert elements, such as sand and earth pigments, a bridge is formed between the body and the landscape, serving as a conduit for temporal expression.

Campbell, on the other hand, uses embroidery to draw in temporal space. Her figurative works look inwards at the making process, highlighting the gestures, rhythm and numbness of the hand, and the dissolution of time during episodes of productive creativity. In this perceived state of suspended animation, threads weave in and out of the fabric, appearing and disappearing from view, thereby inhabiting the realms of presence and absence simultaneously.

In this exhibition, perception is understood as a multifaceted experience, one that can trigger questions and inquiry, or protect us from the harsh truths of human existence. In doing so, we are all invited to embark on an introspective journey through sites of memory, cultural phenomena, and relational aesthetics.

Look. Breathe. Look again.

To be continued by the perceiver…

Text by Nigel Ip