APRIL: SPELUNKING IN BROADLIGHT
by Cynthia Chen, April 23, 2026
Installation view of April featuring(from left to right): Don’t fall in love with a rock star, Four Piece Stepped Painting. Photo by Ridwana Rahman, 2026.
“A drawing of two forks,” “A canvas that fits an amount of space,” “An arrangement of tiles on the ceiling,” “A shoe rack containing shoes,” the exhibition catalogue for April consists of a list that appears jarringly plain and thrillingly intriguing. The descriptions read less like informative labels than a deliberate gesture stripping the interpretive scaffolding that sets the foundation of the show. For this ten-day exhibition held at the basement of Nguyen Wahed Gallery organized by the UMARELL art collective, that compression of language is the fundamental method for both creation and reception. The indefinite article, a fork, a projection, a canvas, insists on a singularity of notice and an ordinariness of presence at once. The show rejects the grammar of significance before it reveals itself to the viewers.
Upon entering the space, one had to lower their head and fold their torso. That physical concession was the first instruction of encounter, primal and candid. The absence of any single dominant work or orienting anchor organically diffuses hierarchy that can be common in gallery spaces. The result was an alternative liberation with attention dispersing freely: from a pair of red porcelain boots tucked in the corner (Devon Pin-yu Chen,) to a board of glass beads glued along the ceiling (Candela Baldo), to a picture of a mannequin bust affixed to the metal door (Ke Zhang). The arrangements were not curatorial harshness but a theoretical refusal that traded the authority of any focal piece for something less swayed by pressure of documentation and thus, restless and visceral.
What emerged within such an arrangement was a show demanding corporeal experience beyond pure looking. Instead of examining works, I found myself excavating them, moving through the space as if spelunking a cave that happened to be brightly lit and wide open, which only made the descent more exhilarating. In Iris Wu’s untitled (Drawer 2) (2026), a found puppetry box with a rat figurine sits wedged between a drawer and the wall, slightly falling off as if caught mid-escape. In Liz Schneider’s Swamp Milkweek (2026), a cow’s underside protrudes from a ceramic plate, a rarely seen angle that registers the body estranged and unrecognizable. Ridwana Rahman’s celebration nails a projection by the door, requiring viewers to lean in and wait. These placements are not just arbitrary decisions. They consistently demand a stretched physicality, making the act of looking closer to searching and discovering.
Tusi Circles I, Her Love in the Fairyland
Umarell has been organizing short-lived, “improvisational” exhibitions since October 2025, and April is indeed a comprehensive expression of that ethos. Giorgia Alliata di Montereale, the co-founder of Umarell, described the vision as an attempt to replenish the kind of flawed but raw energy that institutional curation struggles to foster, through what she called a “folklore sharing mechanism” that grants these ephemeral shows their peculiar intimacy. In a time when many curatorial decisions are shaped by the effect of the documentation, UMARELL’s approach resists that optimization by putting the works in sync with their viewers.
That quiet resistance runs through the individual pieces too. Ray Barsante’s Four piece stepped painting (2026) disorients spatial recognition through misalignment and repetition, collapsing the assumption of a surface into something that keeps reforming as one moves around it. This multi-layered meaning accrual takes on a more painterly route in Fernan Bilik’s Inward Curve (2026), where curvature carries both enigma and philosophy. Zaid Arshad’s Tusi Circles (2026), installed in four assemblies across the upper corners of the walls, act as poetic coordinates, hinting at navigation systems or film frames. Emerita Baik’s aluminum sculpture, Don’t fall in love with a popstar (2025), stages a tension between semantic meanings and somatic knowledge. That whimsical intellect also appears in Andrius Alvarez-Backus’s We Bring Our Lares With Us (2025), depicting two interlocked forks and distilling a disciplined intimacy that morphs into unsettlement the longer you look at it.
Soomin Kang’s Shoe Rack (2026) has the gravitational pull that amplifies the uncanny encounters in the show. In this three-tiered wooden rack, functionality is poeticized. The rack holds altered found objects and wooden sculptures that suggest ambivalent usages. That indeterminacy produces a rewiring of attention and retention, pulling the viewers toward the texture of the unknowable. The encounter it stages is anticipated yet somehow unlocatable.
That quality of improvisation extends into a structural conduit in the show’s installation. The pipes engage in a geometric conversation with Baik’s aluminum sculpture. Even the dust remnants feel like information. The boundary between what was placed and what was found was dissolved, and so is the boundary between the intentional and the incidental. The show and the shown become inseparable.
April, named after a month, something destined to pass, embodies an unapologetic temporality. There is a rawness to both the curatorial approach and the exhibited pieces that feels porous and well-mediated, uncommitted to resolution in a way that reads philosophical and political. The show claims wonder in these moments where the body grasps something surely before the mind articulates with certainty. It requires presence and that gentle yet radical ask is the show’s fundamental argument.
Installation View of April featuring(from top to bottom): Tusi Circles I, Her Love in the Fairyland, untitled(drawer #2), untitled (souvenir). Photo by Ridwana Rahman, 2026.
Author bio:
Cynthia Chen is a writer based in New York City, originally from Shanghai. Her writings can be found or forthcoming in mercuryfirs, grotto journal, No,dear, The Margins, Impulse Magazine, The Common, Epiphany, Sinetheta Magazine, and elsewhere. Her work has also been supported by the Community of Writers, Beijing Poetry Festival, and Accent Sisters.