Unbecoming
Featuring artists: David Apakidze, Florence Eadie, Zeus Li, Maureen Jeram, Min-Jia, Sargon Khnu
17 October - 1 November, 2026
Curated by Iris Ziyao Li
Unbecoming brings together work by six artists across two floors of a former nursery school and training centre for women in Stratford, East London. The exhibition considers how bodies, objects and images are shaped by inherited conventions and social expectations, and their potential departures from these norms. When a body no longer conforms to these expectations, does this signal failure, refusal, or a loosening of the very standards by which we are judged?
The word ‘unbecoming’ insinuates judgement. It presupposes a code of conduct and someone with the authority to judge, yet such a judgement rarely distinguishes between those who cannot conform and those who will not. Read as un-becoming, the word points elsewhere: to the loosening of an established form, a drift away from a predetermined shape, the gradual dissolving of boundaries once taken for granted.
The mannequins in Maureen Jeram’s works were designed to take on any pose, but these articulated figures begin to suggest an inner life of their own under Jeram’s hand. Yet the exposed hinges and suspension threads reveal the mechanisms by which these poses are produced, becoming repositories for the expectations placed upon them. What appears to be the emergence of subjectivity may itself be another effect of being shaped by those expectations.
In Zeus Li’s The Weight of Staying, the body has disappeared altogether. All that remains are wooden heels, devoid of their origin, fixed against the wall. Once used to support the body and its posture, the heel no longer serves its original function, yet retains traces of the body it once supported. Stripped of its function and fixture, it appears faintly absurd and violent. While Jeram’s mannequins appear to acquire vitality through external control, Li’s heels preserve the structure that once acted upon an absent body. In both works, the body remains difficult to separate from the forces that shape it.
If Li’s heels retain the marks of external shaping once the body has gone, Florence Eadie turns this instability back toward the body itself. In My abdomen is an open mouth (2026), a woollen body opens at the belly, turning its interior into a space that can be explored. Embroidered text describes reaching into the abdominal cavity and touching its organs. The body becomes both the subject and the object of its own exploration. Softness no longer simply means protection and openness, yet does not imply injury. The distinction between inside and outside, control and exposure, begins to dissolve.
In Eadie’s work, an open body does not signify injury alone. For Min-Jia, cutting and piercing are ways to give material new form and the capacity to move. Min-Jia trained in shadow-puppet making in Hua County, Shaanxi, and the experience led the artist to reconsider the relationship between material, ornament and life. Treated cowhide regains its suppleness and, through repeated cutting, perforating and assembling, becomes a body that can move. Akin to Jeram’s mannequins, the shadow puppet is a jointed bodywaiting to be manipulated. The artist connects this structure to their own bodily experience: joints are both mechanisms of movement and means to understand bodily vulnerability. Min-Jia’s drawings weave together decorative motifs from folk art, Art Nouveau and queer anime, which seem to take on lives of their own. Ornaments are no longer laid over the body, but reimagined as ways a body might exist.
Where Min-Jia allows decorative languages to mutate and grow, David Apakidze reworks traditional methodology. Drawing on Georgian Orthodox iconography, the artist uses stained glass to introduce desire, irreverence and queer imagery into a visual language traditionally associated with sacred authority. The forms here remain recognisable, even as their meanings begin to shift.
Comparatively, Sargon Khnu draws on an established art-historical convention, placing the male body within a posture commonly associated with the female nude. The wooden relief Untitled (Chaturbate screenshot I) (2026) grows out of the artist’s research into male sex work and webcam platforms, and engages questions of desire, power and autonomy. Within these encounters, the body is both an object of desire and a subject capable of setting terms, negotiating their boundaries.
The building that houses the show dates from the early 2000s. It was built to train women in East London in what were then called “non-traditional skills”, with childcare on site. Upstairs, mothers learned skills once considered unsuitable for women. Downstairs, children were looked after. From the staircase landing, almost the entire ground floor comes into view. A building once devoted to education and care now places its visitors in the position of looking and judging. Yet the works offer no simple distinction between external constraint and deliberate choice. When we decide that a body, a behaviour or an image is unbecoming, does that judgement reveal how the object departs from the norm, or the limits of our own expectations?
Featuring artists: David Apakidze, Florence Eadie, Zeus Li, Maureen Jeram, Min-Jia, Sargon Khnu
17 October - 1 November, 2026
Curated by Iris Ziyao Li
Unbecoming brings together work by six artists across two floors of a former nursery school and training centre for women in Stratford, East London. The exhibition considers how bodies, objects and images are shaped by inherited conventions and social expectations, and their potential departures from these norms. When a body no longer conforms to these expectations, does this signal failure, refusal, or a loosening of the very standards by which we are judged?
The word ‘unbecoming’ insinuates judgement. It presupposes a code of conduct and someone with the authority to judge, yet such a judgement rarely distinguishes between those who cannot conform and those who will not. Read as un-becoming, the word points elsewhere: to the loosening of an established form, a drift away from a predetermined shape, the gradual dissolving of boundaries once taken for granted.
The mannequins in Maureen Jeram’s works were designed to take on any pose, but these articulated figures begin to suggest an inner life of their own under Jeram’s hand. Yet the exposed hinges and suspension threads reveal the mechanisms by which these poses are produced, becoming repositories for the expectations placed upon them. What appears to be the emergence of subjectivity may itself be another effect of being shaped by those expectations.
In Zeus Li’s The Weight of Staying, the body has disappeared altogether. All that remains are wooden heels, devoid of their origin, fixed against the wall. Once used to support the body and its posture, the heel no longer serves its original function, yet retains traces of the body it once supported. Stripped of its function and fixture, it appears faintly absurd and violent. While Jeram’s mannequins appear to acquire vitality through external control, Li’s heels preserve the structure that once acted upon an absent body. In both works, the body remains difficult to separate from the forces that shape it.
If Li’s heels retain the marks of external shaping once the body has gone, Florence Eadie turns this instability back toward the body itself. In My abdomen is an open mouth (2026), a woollen body opens at the belly, turning its interior into a space that can be explored. Embroidered text describes reaching into the abdominal cavity and touching its organs. The body becomes both the subject and the object of its own exploration. Softness no longer simply means protection and openness, yet does not imply injury. The distinction between inside and outside, control and exposure, begins to dissolve.
In Eadie’s work, an open body does not signify injury alone. For Min-Jia, cutting and piercing are ways to give material new form and the capacity to move. Min-Jia trained in shadow-puppet making in Hua County, Shaanxi, and the experience led the artist to reconsider the relationship between material, ornament and life. Treated cowhide regains its suppleness and, through repeated cutting, perforating and assembling, becomes a body that can move. Akin to Jeram’s mannequins, the shadow puppet is a jointed bodywaiting to be manipulated. The artist connects this structure to their own bodily experience: joints are both mechanisms of movement and means to understand bodily vulnerability. Min-Jia’s drawings weave together decorative motifs from folk art, Art Nouveau and queer anime, which seem to take on lives of their own. Ornaments are no longer laid over the body, but reimagined as ways a body might exist.
Where Min-Jia allows decorative languages to mutate and grow, David Apakidze reworks traditional methodology. Drawing on Georgian Orthodox iconography, the artist uses stained glass to introduce desire, irreverence and queer imagery into a visual language traditionally associated with sacred authority. The forms here remain recognisable, even as their meanings begin to shift.
Comparatively, Sargon Khnu draws on an established art-historical convention, placing the male body within a posture commonly associated with the female nude. The wooden relief Untitled (Chaturbate screenshot I) (2026) grows out of the artist’s research into male sex work and webcam platforms, and engages questions of desire, power and autonomy. Within these encounters, the body is both an object of desire and a subject capable of setting terms, negotiating their boundaries.
The building that houses the show dates from the early 2000s. It was built to train women in East London in what were then called “non-traditional skills”, with childcare on site. Upstairs, mothers learned skills once considered unsuitable for women. Downstairs, children were looked after. From the staircase landing, almost the entire ground floor comes into view. A building once devoted to education and care now places its visitors in the position of looking and judging. Yet the works offer no simple distinction between external constraint and deliberate choice. When we decide that a body, a behaviour or an image is unbecoming, does that judgement reveal how the object departs from the norm, or the limits of our own expectations?