A Negotiated Absence 

Presence can be felt through absence. This paradox drives the convergent practices of Orly Kritzman and Ni Xuemin, two artists who translate void into meaning through distinct yet complementary approaches.

Orly Kritzman turns to clay as her narrative medium, embedding it in disruption, resistance, and transformation. Her ceramic sculptures emerge from unsettling the “grounding” of clay, cultivating a “there–not–there” quality through repeated acts of breaking and mending.

This is a material metaphor for cultural displacement: the psychic void between losing one cultural structure before another takes hold, echoing her experience of moving between countries and cultural contexts. Through strategic technical disruption—embedding organics and minerals as "agitators" within the clay— she rejects aesthetic perfection in favour of quiet defiance, drawing attention to what remains unspoken. Her work embraces repair not as ‘restore’ but ‘transform’, creating what she terms "future archaeology": scarred forms that document psychological states through physical stress.

Where Kritzman’s absence is rooted in the void of cultural displacement, Ni Xuemin’s practice emerges from the spatial tension and perceptual estrangement. Drawing from the language of Surrealism, Ni dissolves boundaries between interior and exterior, reality and illusion. Architectural elements—doors, windows, curtains—function as boundary objects that simultaneously connect and divide the realms of experience.

By strategically eliminating human figures, Ni creates not emptiness but what Rosalind Krauss calls modality of presence—spaces where absence becomes the subject and lingers in every carefully composed frame. In this exhibition, absence is negotiated as an active force rather than a passive void. Both artists create works that remain in constant transformation, inviting a writerly engagement in which meaning emerges not from what is given, but from what the viewer constructs .

Kritzman’s future archaeology contrasts with Ni’s historical surrealism in the present—one excavating tomorrow’s traces from today’s materials, the other revealing the uncanny persistence of dreams within waking reality.

In bringing these practices into dialogue, the exhibition reveals how absence functions not as a lack but as a site of potential — a space where new meanings can be negotiated, and the "there-not-there" becomes a territory of its own. Here, what is missing speaks more eloquently than what is present, that the gaps in our experience often contain the most urgent truths.

These convergent territories of loss resonate with contemporary urgencies—global displacement, cultural fragmentation, digital mediation, the collapse of traditional boundaries—this makes the inquiries posed by Kritzman and Ni feel particularly relevant.

Opening Night
Thursday, 4 September, 6–9pm

Venue
Ripple Verse Gallery
56 Dawes Road
Fulham, London SW6 7EJ