Exhibition | Uncanny Playgrounds

EN/中

Uncanny Playgrounds

International Group Exhibition
20 September – 26 October 2024
Hypha Gallery, Sugar House Island, London

Exhibition Overview

Uncanny Playgrounds is a two-part exhibition presenting twenty-one emerging artists. Part 1 is curated by Ana Paola Flores, Part 2 by Bernice Lin, with Veronique Chen co-curating both parts.

Part One explores the intersection of childhood nostalgia and adult unease through a diverse array of mediums, including installation, photography, sculpture, performance, sound and music events. The exhibition is designed to be immersive, inclusive and playful, offering an adult audience an opportunity to explore the complex emotions evoked by nostalgic playthings reimagined with an uncanny twist.

Nostalgia operates throughout the exhibition as something simultaneously familiar, seductive and unsettling. Objects associated with childhood play invite recognition, yet encountering them again as adults exposes a distance between past and present. Playthings originally designed by adults for children can therefore reveal not only childhood memories, but adult desires, anxieties and cultural expectations.

Part One artists include Sandra Blow, Claudia Martignetti, Jeehee Kim, Lawrence Kirk, Minori Murata, Arabella Simpson, Xin Huang, Milly Aburrow, 32, Janice Kei and Tong Wu.

Sandra Blow's work was added to MoMA's permanent photography collection in New York in 2024, and Uncanny Playgrounds marked her first exhibition in London, UK.

Claudia Martignetti, another key artist in the exhibition, offers a critical perspective on nostalgia, considering its seductive familiarity alongside the dissonance produced when adults encounter toys and characters they can no longer experience in the same way as they did as children. Through this tension, nostalgic play-objects become reminders of the complicated relationship between childhood imagination and adult experience.

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Uncanny Playgrounds I, Exhibition View, Hypha Studios, London, 2024

Part Two presents Ya Hsuan Hsiao, Edyta Jaworek, Max King, James Lang, Hollie Palmer, Attiyyah Rahman, Valinor Yinuo Wu and Yi Shan Zhong, with Hannah Kay participating as a visiting artist.

The second phase invites viewers to contemplate anxieties surrounding unfamiliar cities and environments through imagined movements from the artists' perspectives. The exhibition considers how environmental unease can emerge not only in unfamiliar places, but also within everyday workplaces and domestic environments.

Through sculptural installations, interactive performances, moving image and community engagement, Part Two asks audiences to move through the exhibition both physically and emotionally. Imagined movement becomes a way of crossing physical distance, connecting childhood memories with the present and asking how a sense of security or “home” might be reconstructed in different spaces.

Across both parts, Uncanny Playgrounds expands the idea of the playground beyond a physical childhood environment. It becomes a psychological and social space in which familiarity and estrangement, safety and anxiety, play and adulthood continuously overlap.

The project was developed in collaboration with Hypha Studios and Sugar House Island, with support from the Goldsmiths Exhibitions Hub, Department of Art, and made possible through the wider development of Sugar House Island by Vastint.

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Uncanny Playgrounds II, Exhibition View, Hypha Studios, London, 2024

Events & Public Programmes

Public programming extended the curatorial framework through live performance, sound, participatory workshops and collective play, shifting audiences from spectators towards active participants.

Part I included Lidia’s opening performance It’s Not Easy Being a Princess and a live DJ set by Delirious Blanc. Monty Williams and Ya Hsuan Hsiao’s Three Cities connected Taipei, London and Sheffield through moving image, sound and performance, while ArtyMcFly’s TeddyLand invited visitors to dismantle and recombine toys selected from more than 600 pre-loved teddy bears.

Part II opened with a movement performance by Viktoriia Hontarchuk, exploring migration, anxiety and changing ideas of home. The exhibition concluded with a Conker Tournament hosted by Elisha Fall, bringing a traditional British playground game into the contemporary art space.

Together, these programmes expanded the exhibition’s exploration of play, memory, embodiment and participation, blurring the boundaries between artwork, performance and social interaction.

Exhibition Information