27 February 2025 - 2 March 2025
APT Gallery, London, 6 Creekside, London SE8 4SA
Time surrounds us, shaping every moment, yet remains elusive and hard to pin down. Pickled! explores this intangible element of our lives. It focuses on the moments we overlook, the pauses between actions, the gaps between events, and the hours that slip by unnoticed. These fragments, if seen as currency, would be akin to loose change forgotten behind a sofa.
The exhibition draws inspiration from the leap day—a once-every-four-years anomaly that reflects time’s imperfect structure. This extra day, both critical and inconsequential, challenges the way we think about time. Like a ghost on the calendar, it exists outside the usual flow, a reminder of how malleable time can be.
Pickled! blends the feel of a nuclear bunker with the intimacy of a time capsule, creating a space that feels both suspended and dynamic. Visitors encounter environments that echo paradoxes, such as Schrödinger’s thought experiment, where conflicting truths coexist. Clocks in the space tick at varying speeds, dreams preserve fleeting moments, and distinctions between past, present, and future blur. Time becomes less of a straight line and more of an intricate web—a fluid experience shaped by perception. How does it feel to inhabit a moment that is both fleeting and significant? What can we learn from the way time stretches or compresses in our memories and dreams?
Pickled! offers a setting where time behaves in unconventional ways, urging us to rethink our relationship with it. It is not about reclaiming time that has passed but celebrating its peculiarities and contradictions. The show invites us to notice the unnoticed and find value in the transient.
In line with the exhibition’s themes, the audio descriptions act as snapshots of time, capturing the creative process as it unfolds. Some were recorded while the works were still in progress, preserving the uncertainties, ideas, and transformations that shaped them; others reflect on the pieces' evolution. In this way, the descriptions become an integral part of Pickled!, reflecting its exploration of time as fluid and ever-changing.
Curated by Nastia Svarevska with Sid Smith
About Thin Red Lion
Thin Red Lion was born from lively discussions in post-work pub gatherings and draws resonance from the ethos of these spaces. The name combines ‘The Red Lion’, the most common pub name in the UK, with ‘The Thin Red Line’, a figure of speech for any thinly spread group holding firm against the odds.
Photography by Pietro Molinaris