Building Mythologies presents works by Betty C Fan, Dora Lam, Filippo Muzi Falconi, Leyla Borovalı and Myriame Dachraoui, following the fifth edition of Hands-on Residency. Curated by Senem Cagla Bilgin-Keys, the exhibition considers how inherited stories and cultural traditions continue to change through artistic interpretation. Drawing on experiences that range from personal memory to the histories embedded in materials, the five artists develop distinctly individual approaches to the exhibition's theme. Their works are presented at Siegfried Contemporary, in Andreas Siegfried's West-London home, where his private collection has shared space with temporary exhibitions since 2012.
The setting is personal, and deliberately so. Siegfried once described it as his «private projection space», a place where he can introduce artists he believes in and explore unexpected relationships between works. Visitors encounter art within the circumstances of everyday life, surrounded by objects that have accumulated their own histories.
This November, the house welcomes Building Mythologies, the concluding exhibition of the fifth Hands-on Residency. The collaboration grew out of a shared interest in the possibilities of artistic exchange. Siegfried has often emphasised the importance of getting to know artists and understanding the ideas behind their work. As he put it in an interview with Julieta Schildknecht: "You need to start a dialog with the artist". It is a conviction that finds a natural counterpart in the Hands-on programme.
Founded as an online residency, Hands-on brings together artists who continue working in their own studios while participating in a six-week programme of critical discussion. Its fifth edition, held from 21 September to 1 November 2026, invited participants to consider the role of mythology in contemporary life. Through exchanges with curators and other practitioners, the artists examined ideas already present in their work and encountered perspectives drawn from different cultural backgrounds. The five participants were selected through an open call, with Senem Cagla Bilgin-Keys and Andreas Siegfried involved in the selection. Those based in London also visited Bassett Road during the residency, establishing an early connection with the exhibition space.
The exhibition is curated by Senem Cagla Bilgin-Keys, a London-based independent curator who founded Art Elsewhere in 2017. The platform develops exhibitions and collaborative projects with contemporary artists alongside its art advisory activities. Bilgin-Keys has worked extensively with questions of migration and cultural identity, paying particular attention to the ways social histories shape artistic expression. Her engagement with ecological thought also informs the present exhibition, in which materials and the natural environment become participants in the construction of meaning.
The title Building Mythologies suggests a process that is still underway. Myths endure because they can be retold, and what they communicate changes with the people who inherit them. Their influence extends beyond the familiar territory of gods and legendary figures. Family photographs acquire meaning through the circumstances in which they are preserved. A craft tradition may carry knowledge that was never written down. Even the way nature is understood reflects beliefs transmitted across generations. The artists approach these histories through their own experiences, often finding that what appears familiar becomes less certain on closer examination.
In the paintings of Dora Lam, this uncertainty begins with the photographic image. Lam draws on colonial and personal archives, isolating the faces of women from their original settings. She renders them with remarkable precision, placing them against sharply defined geometric forms and fields of colour. The faces remain recognisable as portraits, yet almost everything that might establish their circumstances has been removed. Lam is acutely aware of the assumptions through which archival images have been collected and interpreted. Her paintings disturb that inherited authority. The women appear before us with an extraordinary immediacy, while the histories attached to their photographs become open to question.
For Myriame Dachraoui, personal memory is closely entwined with the imaginative world of Tunisian folklore. Originally trained as an architect, she creates paintings in which familiar interiors acquire strange proportions and uncertain perspectives. Her grandmother has become a recurring presence in her work, less as a conventional portrait than as a figure around whom family memories gather. Dachraoui has also explored El Ghoula, the formidable female creature of North African legend, using its unsettling associations to examine taboos surrounding the female body. The domestic spaces in her paintings are charged with particular significance. Drawing on her own experiences, she considers how the home can offer intimacy while also imposing restrictions on those who inhabit it. Architecture provides a framework through which these tensions become visible.
An altogether different kind of inherited knowledge informs the ceramics of Leyla Borovalı. Originally from İzmir, Borovalı draws on textile traditions from the Aegean and wider Mediterranean, particularly the intricate techniques of oya lacework. Historically associated with women's domestic craft, these delicate patterns carry traces of the social worlds in which they were made. Borovalı translates them into clay, allowing the details of embroidery to reappear as ceramic reliefs. The transformation is striking. What once belonged to flexible fabric becomes a fired surface, with the permanence and weight of another material. The work gives renewed attention to techniques whose cultural significance resides as much in the act of making as in the finished ornament.
Filippo Muzi Falconi approaches the relationship between material and history through his longstanding fascination with the natural world. He spent childhood summers on his father's farm in Liguria, exploring the landscape and making things from what he found there. Today, he continues to gather fallen timber, wild clay and other natural materials, responding to their particular qualities as he develops his sculptures. Some of his objects recall ancient ritual artefacts or votive offerings. Their forms reflect his interest in animist traditions and in the ways earlier cultures imagined their place within the natural world. Muzi Falconi has spoken of wanting to restore a sense of wonder to our understanding of nature, whose complexity continually exceeds human knowledge. He also co-runs Apua, an artist residency on the family farm, where the local landscape becomes the starting point for collective experimentation.
The work of Betty C Fan introduces an acoustic dimension to the exhibition. Born in Taipei and raised between Hong Kong and the United States, Fan trained in classical music before turning towards sculpture and experimental sound. She constructs instruments from materials such as clay and metal, creating objects that sometimes resemble artefacts from an unfamiliar archaeological past. Their purpose, however, becomes apparent when they are played. In performances combining improvisation with field recordings, the instruments produce a shifting soundscape shaped by touch and physical movement. Fan's interest in sound is closely connected to questions of cultural memory and displacement. She approaches listening as a means of recovering experiences that cannot always be expressed through conventional forms of narrative.
The artists' approaches to mythology differ considerably. In Lam's paintings, the historical photograph loses some of its apparent certainty; Dachraoui turns personal experience into a world populated by remembered and imagined figures. Borovalı's ceramics preserve the gestures of an inherited technique in an unfamiliar material. Muzi Falconi looks towards the spiritual relationships earlier cultures established with nature, while Fan gives memory a physical presence through sound.
These different interpretations are brought together by Bilgin-Keys in an exhibition that has developed through the residency's sustained exchanges. Its presentation at Siegfried Contemporary introduces another element: the particular character of a place where collecting and exhibiting have long been closely connected. For Siegfried, the experience of an artwork is shaped by its surroundings and by the encounters it makes possible. At Bassett Road, the ideas explored over six weeks find a shared physical setting, where the relationships between the works can be discovered anew.