Once, Again
Nabil Azab, Jennifer Carvalho, Alice Gong Xiaowen, Lotus L. Kang, Karice Mitchell, Michael Thompson
November 6 to December 19, 2026
Co-curated with Anaïs Castro
Press Release
A gesture repeated, an image revisited, an object handled, or a memory carried gathers new meanings and accumulates traces over time. Once, Again considers what happens when something is encountered, carried forward, and made anew. The artists brought together here attend to processes of transmission, residue, and reassembly, tracing how gestures, memories, migrations, and cultural histories persist within images and materials, not as intact forms, but as fragments that are continually mediated, altered, displaced, and remade.
At the heart of Once, Again is an interest in transmission as an uneven process. To carry something forward invariably means to transform it. Images are translated across contexts; gestures are repeated with difference; materials retain traces of previous use; memories surface in fragments, reshaped by distance, interruption, and time. Through metamorphosis and loss, something endures. Residue becomes a form of evidence: a record of the encounters through which the past continues to inhabit the present.
The artists in the exhibition approach repetition as a means of producing difference. To do something again is to encounter it under altered conditions, with other meanings embedded within it. This perspective complicates the idea of inheritance as a fixed lineage or a seamless transfer between generations. What is received needs translation, reconsideration, or regeneration to keep carrying forward.
This attention to transformation extends to our relationship with objects. At a time when repair is often more costly than replacement, our interaction with things has been radically abbreviated. Yet objects are shaped by the lives we live alongside them. Through use, they are handled, worn, damaged, altered and repaired. These marks of contact accumulate memories, experiences and meaning. The works in Once, Again propose a more sustained and attentive relationship with material things, in which gradual transformation is understood not as a loss of its original form, but as an extension of its life.
Once, Again is not interested in recovery so much as in persistence: what remains, what changes, and what becomes possible through repetition. To encounter something once, and then again, is to discover that neither encounter stands alone: each leaves a trace upon the next.