Friends and Family : Alya Hatta, Emma Prempeh, Olha Pryymak, Noemi S. Conan, Ozer Toraman and Caroline Wong.

Pi Artworks is delighted to present Friends and Family, a group show of six young and emerging, London based artists: Alya Hatta, Emma Prempeh, Olha Pryymak, Noemi S. Conan, Ozer Toraman and Caroline Wong. The work produced by these artists draw attention to the importance of belonging. Memories of particular moments in the artists life are drawn upon as inspiration for their work. Using this as their source of inspiration, the work serves to explore the workings of memory and experience. Each artist here has recalled faces, landscapes, objects of meaning along with the feelings that accompany them, resulting in a confessional narrative that we are invited to live in, just like a memory.

Often, for these artists, their practice is used as a way to recall a feeling, memory or image to the conscious mind and results in work that shares an intimacy with the viewer, a moment of nostalgia. Whether it is through depictions of partially realised figures or whether it is the colour that intends to help place us within a memory, all of these pieces are allegorical in nature and seek to question the way we experience the past and the present. We can see these attempts of recalling memories, however refracted they become, as ways of remembering how it felt in those moments to belong. If we regard belonging, a fundamental human desire and known within the psychological field to be the drive behind much of human behaviour, to be central to human happiness, it becomes apparent why we find ourselves becoming reluctant to leave. Ultimately, with friends and family we become part of a larger group that allows us to feel part of something bigger and more important than ourselves.