After Eden: Intimacies Beyond Origin

Curated by Faithe Yang, Bobby Hsiung and Yuqiang Chen
Presented by The Eel Project
Supported by HSIUNG

The Crypt Gallery, St Pancras New Church
Duke’s Road, off Euston Road, London WC1H 9AD
24–29 July 2026

After Eden: Intimacies Beyond Origin begins with Genesis. Before Eve appears, another form of intimacy already exists in Eden. The proximity between God and Adam precedes both loneliness and sexual difference. Eve’s arrival does more than introduce another figure into the story; it reorganises intimacy around the heterosexual pair, establishing it as the central and legitimate form of human relation. The earlier intimacy between creator and created recedes from view. After Eden begins at this rupture, at the moment when same-sex intimacy is written out of the origin story and queer bodies and desires are placed beyond accepted definitions of nature, kinship and the sacred.

This expulsion has never occurred only once. It is repeated across cultures, religions and social systems whenever desire is named as deviance, and whenever bodies are excluded from family, religious community or national belonging. For queer subjects, diaspora often begins when belonging becomes impossible. It is not only a question of geography, but a structural condition: a separation from the narratives through which a person is expected to recognise themselves. The more than twenty artists gathered in After Eden approach this condition from different positions. Some encounter skin and desire through the camera. Others sediment bodily memory, trauma and faith into fabric, plaster, metal and clay. Some use performance to transform the body itself into a temporary ritual space. Working across London, Beijing, Seoul, Berlin and the Nordic countries, they carry distinct cultural and personal histories while returning to a shared question: once the body has been expelled from the origin narrative, how can intimacy be practised anew?

The exhibition takes place at The Crypt Gallery beneath St Pancras New Church in London, a Grade I listed building completed in 1822. Brick vaults divide the underground level into a sequence of connected chambers, and visitors move gradually deeper through the architecture. For six days, this religious foundation becomes a site of queer gathering before returning to its previous state. The temporary nature of this transformation is not incidental to the exhibition, but part of its argument. Queer spaces have often sustained themselves through repeated appearance and disappearance. They open, close, relocate and re-emerge. Their physical existence may be precarious, but the relationships formed within them can continue beyond the structures that briefly contain them.

In In a Queer Time and Place (2005), Jack Halberstam argues that dominant Western understandings of time are organised through heteronormative expectations. Growth, marriage, reproduction and ageing are presented as a universal life trajectory, while lives that move outside this sequence are often understood as incomplete or delayed. Halberstam describes queer time as a refusal of this linear structure, a temporality formed through intensity, interruption, repetition and alternative ways of living. Queer space follows a similar rhythm. Temporality and instability are not necessarily signs of failure, but conditions through which gathering becomes possible.

This instability is not an abstract theoretical idea. Over the past several years, London’s queer nightlife and cultural venues have faced persistent threats of closure, redevelopment and displacement. Spaces disappear, move to unfamiliar locations, return under new names or remain suspended between announced closure and hoped-for reopening. The communities attached to them dissolve and reform in turn, tracing the same rhythm of interruption and repetition. Yet gathering continues to emerge elsewhere. After Eden inhabits this cycle, not by attempting to permanently occupy the crypt, but by activating it through a temporary concentration of artworks, bodies, sound and shared presence.

During the exhibition’s daily opening hours, the crypt remains quiet and almost completely dark. The artworks become the primary sources of light, guiding visitors through the chambers while leaving parts of the architecture concealed. Visitors may enter repeatedly, encountering the space in a different bodily and emotional state each time. The exhibition treats time not simply as something that passes from beginning to end, but as something that accumulates through repetition, memory and return.

The exhibition adopts the nearly two-decade practice of artist 223, also known as Lin Zhipeng, as a narrative starting point. Since the early 2000s, 223 has documented bodies, emotions and everyday life within Chinese queer communities, transforming private encounters into a continually expanding visual archive. This archive is not constructed through distance or institutional classification, but through friendship, proximity and sustained presence. Around it, the exhibition brings together works that explore how bodies can be held, obscured, transformed, reconstructed and remembered through material.

Jos Nyreen renders intimate figures in pencil and charcoal on used fabric. The contours of the bodies merge with the folds, stains and creases already carried by the material, making it difficult to separate the image from the fabric’s previous life. Hand-shaped metal frames enclose the works with the care and tension of reliquaries. Gabriel Cohen layers photographic prints, clay, plaster and charcoal across unstable surfaces. Bodies appear and disappear beneath accumulated matter, while his titles bring the vocabulary of queer sexuality into contact with the rhythms of prayer, visitation and devotion. Desire is not placed in opposition to the sacred, but allowed to inhabit its language.

Conor Quinn’s paintings and soft sculptures extend from a practice rooted in stop-motion animation. His handmade bodies carry an implied vitality, as though they might move beyond their fixed forms. Raised in a Catholic environment, Quinn initially used puppets without explicit gender markers to encode queer relationships. For After Eden, hanging textile creatures occupy the vaults of the crypt and cast shifting shadows across the brickwork. Wen Daoguang draws from traditional Chinese ritual forms, transforming the visual and social structures of banquets, sorcery and taboo into artistic methods. His sculptures and installations hold bodies and desires that resist absorption into orderly narratives, allowing them to remain within the constructed framework without becoming fully legible on its terms.

RADVLAD uses photography and digital compositing to construct bodies and environments that do not exist in physical reality. Human and animal forms are grafted together, figures are divided through mirroring, and domestic interiors are disrupted by surreal elements. These images question whether the “natural body” has ever been a neutral or stable category. Across the exhibition, the body appears not as a finished object but as a site of negotiation. It absorbs memory, pressure, pleasure, violence and care, becoming archive, shelter, apparatus, offering and threshold.

On the opening night, the exhibition shifts from sustained viewing into a singular embodied event. Performers share the darkened gallery with the installed works, activating the crypt through movement, sound and temporary encounters. Each performance occurs only once and cannot be returned to in precisely the same form. This resistance to complete repetition reflects the exhibition’s understanding of queer time: experience survives through memory, trace and relation rather than through perfect preservation.

Blanca Schlager’s duet reduces the body to silhouette, contour and tension. Two genderless figures meet through movement rather than fixed identity, allowing intimacy to emerge from physical relation. Felix Gumbsch uses his own body across sculpture and performance to explore intimacy, vulnerability and power at the boundary between public and private space. The body becomes both material and witness, exposed to the gaze while attempting to retain agency. Annie Edwards, working with Arno Ivaldi and SØREN MÜLLER, activates Executive Dysfunction within a steel-frame installation, shifting the work from a static object into a functioning system that reorganises the relationship between bodies, architecture and control.

Sol Harding’s SHOCK, loosely informed by Frankenstein, examines the ways grief enters, transforms and sickens the body. Rather than representing trauma from a safe distance, the performer confronts it directly and asks the audience to remain present with discomfort. Photographs from the performance and scanned pages from its handwritten script extend the work into the exhibition, leaving behind fragments of an action that has already disappeared. Together, the opening-night performances turn the crypt into a sequence of temporary ritual spaces. Intimacy is no longer only represented by the artworks, but produced through proximity, attention, endurance and the shared knowledge that the moment cannot be preserved intact.

On Saturday afternoon and evening, music changes the social rhythm of the exhibition. Visitors are no longer positioned primarily as observers, and gathering becomes central to experiencing the space. This programme is co-curated with Goen, a cross-cultural music platform founded in London in 2023 that supports collaboration among musicians and artists from the United Kingdom, China, Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea. Within the crypt, sound performances and DJ sets temporarily transform the vaulted chambers into a site of collective listening, movement and exchange.

This event is not separate from the exhibition. It continues its exploration of queer spaces as structures that repeatedly disappear and re-emerge. When one gathering place closes, another forms. When an established route to belonging becomes unavailable, people construct different forms of intimacy through sound, friendship and shared presence. The temporary nature of the event does not make these connections insignificant. GOEN AFTER EDEN asks whether relationships formed under brief and unstable conditions might continue beyond the architecture that first brought them together, and whether cross-cultural and cross-medium collaboration can generate forms of community that outlast the event itself.

After Eden does not attempt to reconstruct a lost paradise or imagine a return to an untouched beginning. The origin narrative has already been interrupted, and for many queer subjects it was never a place of uncomplicated belonging. Instead, the exhibition considers what may be created after expulsion. Across photography, sculpture, painting, moving image, installation, performance and sound, the participating artists approach intimacy as something that must be repeatedly made. It emerges through the body and its traces, through material and memory, through pleasure, vulnerability, adaptation and care.

After Eden, the garden does not necessarily disappear. It may return in altered forms: beneath a church, inside a temporary gathering, between bodies, through an image, or within the duration of a sound that is already fading. The space will close, the works will leave and the gathering will disperse. What remains is not a restored origin, but the possibility of belonging without one.