The Portals Project: Part One

The Portals Project: Part One: El Umbral - The Threshold, Bermondsey Project Space, London 2022.

Group show with/curated by Helena Goldwater, Lucía Imaz King, Wayne Lucas, and Simon Vincenzi

The works are thresholds that visitors may enter: unbounded spaces, fantastic holes, precarious caves - sites of uncertainty, displacement and risk. As four artists using different but interconnected tactics, the works consist of a number of portals and framings that indicate turning points.

Thresholds, whether in fiction or in architecture, invite us to leave a space behind in order to enter another; to decide to cross into a different world, one that may initially seem impenetrable but that opens up in time. In post-pandemic public life, spaces increasingly feature transparent screens to protect us from contamination, forming invisible divides. By contrast the thresholds in El Umbral break down boundaries and contaminate the imaginary. The invitation to pass through these portals offers choices that are intentionally unsettling. Extract from gallery hand-out/Written by Lucía King

Two publications

• Organisation