Abbas Zahedi, Emmanuel Awuni and Jamiu Agboke, SETAREH in collaboration with Harlesden High Street, London, UK, 2025
Image Gallery
Exhibition Text
Forces of Nature inaugurates SETAREH’s London gallery with works by London based artists Abbas Zahedi, Emmanuel Awuni and Jamiu Agboke realised in collaboration with Harlesden High Street. This partnership folds the community-oriented ethos of HHS into the heart of Mayfair, unsettling familiar hierarchies and proposing a more porous model of collaboration across scales and contexts.
The artists’ practices emerge from diasporic lineages and lived histories, traversing memory, ancestry, and critical engagement with institutional systems. Though distinct in medium and approach, they share a sensitivity to how histories are carried through material and gesture; how memory, value, and belonging are continually remade in form. Together, they articulate a language of reciprocity and resonance, allowing Forces of Nature to unfold as an encounter, a meeting of energies.
Presented as both an archive and a symbolic space of categorisation, Abbas Zahedi’s 11&9 installation includes 20 editions of biographical records (semi-rational records of artchievement, created whilst an artist of Belmacz, 2021). The work reflects on the neoliberal era and the eleven-year premiership of Margaret Thatcher alongside Zahedi’s efforts to culturally integrate into modern British society, prior to becoming an artist. The photocopied records are housed within the drawers of an old filing cabinet, each tray repurposed as a frame mounted on the gallery wall. Together, they speak to systems of uniformity and control. Allowing a degree of risk, Zahedi invites the public to participate in an act of exchange— replacing the records with objects of equal integrity and personal significance. In doing so, he transforms the rigid visual order into a living, evolving organism shaped by collective contribution and individual offerings.
In i’m from that mud (is not an achievement) (2025), Zahedi continues this interrogation. Porcelain bowls from his late mother’s dowry, filled with soil from her gravesite, hold an intimacy that resists commodification. Together, these works question the aesthetics of legitimacy; what is deemed valuable, what is preserved, and what remains untranslatable. Zahedi transforms the gallery into a zone of ethical tension, and memory becomes a form of resistance.
Emmanuel Awuni — a poet and deeply informed by oral traditions — works across sculpture and performance, with music as a central thread. Fascinated by the connections between diasporic soundscapes such as hip-hop, jazz, reggae, and Afrobeats, he challenges institutional and cultural biases through quiet yet powerful gestures. At the front window lies a cast bust, mounted against a blue background reminiscent of the packing foam used in museum storage. Suspended on the wall, the restrained figure becomes a compelling vessel of spiritual resonance — an echo chamber for memory and vibration.
Working on copper and aluminium, Jamiu Agboke reimagines landscape as an unstable threshold between material and memory. His luminous surfaces shift between Lagos and the English countryside, between what is remembered and what is imagined. Reviving the lineage of painting on metal, Agboke transforms its reflective resistance into a living element: light flickers across the surface, gathering in the paint like water finding its rhythm.
The waterfall reappears as a site of pressure and release; a choreography of gravity and surrender. In Figure at the Base of a Waterfall (2025), water turns to haze, to breath; the landscape dissolves into atmosphere, into emotion. Immersive and near-sublime, it holds the image at the edge of dissolution. The work becomes a meditation on that fragile threshold where stillness and intensity converge. Agboke’s paintings invite a contemplation that is neither soft nor passive, but alive with elemental force. In a moment saturated with images, they resist instant readability, offering instead one that breathes, that lingers, that asks us to stay.
Together, these practices converge around a shared poetics of presence; the persistence of what is lived, remembered, and felt beneath systems of order. Each artist, in their own register, traces the forces that bind and unbind form: the pull of memory, the weight of inheritance, the shifting horizon between here and elsewhere. In Forces of Nature, collaboration becomes both method and metaphor: a reorientation of the centre through the force of relation.
11&9 Exchange, Artwork Documentation
Further information about the exhibition and each artist’s work can be found on SETAREH’s website source
Abbas Zahedi // عباس زاهدی // abbzah.com 