Siegfried Contemporary is pleased to showcase the work of French artist Anne Roger Lacan and Indian, London-based artist Radhika Khimji.

Of Things Long Forgotten is a two person show exploring ideas of memory, affections, and the sense of a lost past.

That very moment you want to recreate, once it is lost in the past, metamorphoses into a source of inexpressible nostalgia. It is just that sense of memory that Roger Lacan and Khimji seek to resuscitate.

Anne Roger Lacan’s practice has strong connections with Art Brut, the artistic movement initiated by Jean Dubuffet. She uses found objects and creates sculptures with very strong psychological content. Her work is especially poignant in its attention to details, utilising found objects made from fabric, stone and shells, as well as coral, wire, etc. Each object acts as a link between yesterday and today and contains within itself the foundation of a narrative — a story that brings together the fragments of a life, dreams forgotten and lost, found again. A painful smile or the smell of a perfume can become the glue that mends lost memories and fantasies. Always reminding us of the fragility of our identity and our sense of self.

Radhika Khimji’s uses as a base images she took in her ancestral home of Kutch, Gujurat, Western India. Her process can be described as conceptual, as time is the crucial element she is concerned with. The culmination of many different durations, bringing together the time it took to take the picture, the time it takes to stitch the work, with how long it took to transfer the image on to the page. Her work operates at a crossroads between multiple polarities, suspended between sculpture, painting, drawing and decoration. By combining all of these elements, images overlap with one another to create strange new hybrids. The series of 25 works are internal landscapes. In using black ink and red thread she joins visual gaps in the work. This empty space provides the abstract element in an otherwise historically loaded work. The viewer detects a variety of semi-abstract figures that offer a mere hint of recognizable gestures expressing an energized and menacing sexuality.

I wanted to put both artists together as I sensed a strong connection between their working practices and their individual personalities. Both of them explore, each in their own way, the creation of individual, subjective worlds. A unifying theme of their work is that for both artists the process of making is essential, each starting in unawareness of the final outcome of their artworks.