Commencement I Commandment

Curated by Anzhela Popova and Nathan Yeomans

Private Viewing: Thursday 8 October, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition Dates: 9 – 30 October 2026
Opening Hours: by appointment

Location: 13 Ramsgate Street, E8 2FD, London

The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know it times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never. 

Jacques Derrida ‘Archive Fever’

Commencement/Commandment takes Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever as a point of departure to consider the archive not as fixed or linear, but as something continually disturbed and re-negotiated. Bringing together works by Anastasia Belinskaya, Gülce Tulçalı, Kika Sroka-Miller, Synthetic Studio and Harry Payne, the exhibition considers the archive through different registers: material, technological, speculative and personal. Across the exhibition, these different forms do not aim to present a complete or chronological history. Instead, they point towards an archive made up of fragments: things preserved and things lost, things that can be accessed and others that remain out of reach.

For Derrida, the impulse to preserve is never entirely separate from the possibility of loss. An archive is thereby shaped not only by what enters it, but by what remains outside, who is able to access it, and how its contents come to be read later on. In this sense, an archive does not simply tell us what happened. Rather, it participates in producing the conditions through which something may become history at all. This feels particularly relevant now, when the act of recording has become almost constant: photographs, surveillance, scrolling, data and digital traces are produced at a speed that increasingly complicates what might constitute evidence, memory or even truth.

The works in Commencement/Commandment approach this problem from notably different positions. Anastasia Belinskaya works with coal, quartz, aluminium and ice, treating matter itself as something capable of holding histories that extend far beyond a human lifespan. Geological material itself becomes a kind of record, carrying within it histories of extraction, climate and transformation. Gülce Tulçalı brings the question of the archive much closer to the technologies through which contemporary life is observed and circulated. Through surveillance imagery and digitally connected systems, her work asks what happens when our bodies and actions are being recorded almost as they occur: when the archive begins to form before we have chosen what, if anything, should be remembered.

In “Clouds That Never Rain” (2026), Syntheticduo (Anastasia Belinskaya & Polina Kravchenko) turn towards another infrastructure of contemporary memory: the physical systems concealed behind the metaphor of “the cloud.” What is commonly imagined as weightless, instantaneous and placeless is grounded in an expanding network of data centres – vast architectures dependent on land, energy, water and systems of extraction. The work exposes the material conditions underlying digital storage, bringing the apparently immaterial archive back into contact with architecture, ecology and resource consumption. The cloud, rather than an abstract elsewhere in which information simply persists, emerges as a physical territory with its own limits, dependencies and consequences.

Kika Sroka-Miller’s paintings approach the archive less through preservation than through our desire to make things legible. Fragments of symbol, shape and reference sit within compositions that resist being resolved into a single reading. Perhaps, this is also an archival impulse: the need to categorise, name and arrange fragments so that they begin to mean something. Harry Payne addresses this structure most overtly, and most personally. In Find the Archive, access itself becomes the problem. Moving through a fictional world in search of an undisclosed archive, the viewer is confronted with questions of ownership and exclusion: who is able to find their history, who has been kept outside of it, and whether an archive can ever truly belong to everyone.

Holding these works within Prokofiev Studio introduces another, somewhat quieter layer to these questions. The studio itself exists through an act of preservation and reactivation: works and materials connected to Oleg Prokofiev have survived, moved between contexts and generations, and are now encountered again from the position of the present. And yet, survival does not mean returning something to an untouched past. Each encounter produces another reading, and each act of displaying, cataloguing or placing an older work beside a contemporary one inevitably changes the way it can be understood.

The archive that emerges across the exhibition is therefore neither neutral nor complete. It is geological and digital, institutional and personal, material and interpretative. It can preserve, but it can also exclude; it can make something visible while obscuring something else. Its gaps are not simply failures of preservation but part of the structures through which histories are produced.

Perhaps, then, the archive is less a place in which history sits still than a process through which it keeps changing. Commencement/Commandment does not attempt to define what an archive should contain, but considers the different ways something comes to be preserved, interpreted, withheld or transformed – and what might happen to it next.

ABOUT ARTISTS

Gülce Tulçalı is a London-based artist working across film and photography, with a practice centred on women, political structures and the possibilities of imagining alternative worlds. Drawing on dystopian fiction, surreal cinema and black-and-white photography, she creates symbolic visual narratives in which women perform fictional rituals and inhabit spaces between reality and speculation. Often working collaboratively with friends, family and other artists, Tulçalı uses familiar landscapes and everyday objects to construct a distinctive visual language. Her practice moves fluidly between moving image, analogue photography and darkroom printing. Her film Milk is held in the British Film Institute archive.

Anastasia Belinskaya is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture and  installation. Her research-led practice explores the material foundations of contemporary technologies and the environmental consequences of extraction, working with raw materials including coal, quartz sand, aluminium and frozen freshwater. Through processes of transformation and reassembly, Belinskaya considers the continuity and agency of matter, often approaching her practice as a form of “reverse archaeology.” She was awarded the LVMH Maison/0 This Earth Award in 2025 and has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition (2024, 2025), as well as in exhibitions in London, Lisbon and Milan.

Kika Sroka-Miller is a London-based artist whose painting practice explores disorder, categorisation and the human impulse to make meaning. Working with amorphous forms, fragmented symbols and areas of exposed canvas, their paintings move between abstraction and recognition, resisting fixed or singular readings. Sroka-Miller studied at Chelsea College of Art, Camberwell College of Art and Birkbeck, and is an alum of Turps Painting School (2023–2026). Their work has been exhibited internationally and shortlisted for the Waverton Art Prize. In 2026, they made their screen debut in Eternity, a feature-length art film directed by Susanne Regina Meures. Sroka-Miller is also the founder of Blue Parlour, an artist-run curatorial project and creative network.

Syntheticduo (Anastasia Belinskaya & Polina Kravchenko) is an artist duo working across sculpture, installation, photography and text. Their research-led practice explores the intersection of critical raw materials, technology and myth-making, foundations of technological infrastructure and carriers of deep-time memory. Responding to extractive and human-centred systems, Syntheticduo seeks to reconsider the relationship between humans, technology and the natural world, drawing on mythological thinking to explore material agency, reciprocity and alternative forms of value beyond economic use.

Harry Payne is an England-based artist working across immersive installation, emerging technology and material practice. Exploring archive, heritage, memory and speculative futures, he combines interactive systems with found and archival materials to reactivate histories within the present. Increasingly drawing on personal memory and lived experience as forms of archival material, his work examines the relationship between individual and collective histories, and how we locate ourselves within them.

ABOUT CURATOR NATHAN YEOMANS

Nathan Yeomans is a UK-based curator whose practice spans contemporary art, exhibition-making and curatorial research, with a particular interest in spatial, historical, and cultural contexts. He has curated exhibitions internationally and was awarded the TANK Curator Prize for Danwei Unfolding at TANK Shanghai.

He has worked with both emerging and established artists and has contributed to curatorial projects with The Churches Conservation Trust and Southwark Park Galleries in London, the latter developed as part of his graduate project. He holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art (2023), a Graduate Diploma in Curating, Museums and Galleries from Sotheby’s Institute of Art (2021), and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, UAL (2018).

ABOUT CURATOR ANZHELA POPOVA

Anzhela Popova is a London-based curator and art historian. She graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities with a degree in Theory and Practice of Contemporary Art and has developed her professional practice around contemporary art, exhibition-making and cultural research.

Through her curatorial work, Anzhela Popova focuses on creating meaningful dialogues between artists, historical contexts and audiences. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions, working with both emerging and established artists and has developed projects across different formats, from independent projects to gallery exhibitions. Her practice explores the relationships between artistic research, archival materials and new approaches to exhibition narratives. Anzhela Popova continues to support innovative artistic practices while fostering connections between artists, collectors and cultural communities.

Work in the image: Anastasia Belinskaya, No Place To Hide, 2026.