Power to Care

Through textile, embroidery, painting and sculptural forms, the artists consider how personal and collective histories persist in materials, images and everyday gestures — and what it means to care for their fragile, changing legacies. Moving beyond ideas of care as tenderness or preservation, the exhibition approaches it as an ongoing practice that demands time, labour and attention. Care can sustain and connect, but it can also carry exhaustion, responsibility and ambivalence. Rather than attempting to repair the past or restore what has been lost, Power to Care asks how we might remain attentive to what history leaves behind. Anna Samoylova works with raw calico, hand embroidery, painting and printmaking to explore motherhood as a lived experience shaped by intimacy, repetition and fatigue. Drawing on folkloric and mythological imagery, her works bring personal memories into dialogue with inherited cultural histories. Through the repeated gesture of stitching, time and emotional labour become embedded in the textile surface. Zulfiya Spowart examines material as a carrier of memory and questions whether inheritance can ever preserve the past intact. In Sun, Air and Water – Our Best Friends, she revisits a Soviet-era mosaic still present in a functioning kindergarten in Tashkent. Translating the image through hand-stitched linen, reclaimed fabrics, iron oxidation and soft sculptural forms, Spowart allows it to evolve rather than reconstructing its original state. The work becomes a reflection on how images, materials and meanings change as they move across time and place. Together, the artists approach inheritance as an active and unstable process. Materials age, images shift and memories transform through the gestures that carry them forward. Their works do not seek to heal history or resolve its contradictions, but to attend to its traces.