Sickly Sweet Revenge

Hypha Gallery Marble Arch, 15 Great Cumberland Place, London W1H 7AS

PV: Thursday, 29th May 2025, 6 – 9pm

Open: 30th May – 21st June 2025, Tuesday – Sunday, 12 – 6pm

The show features large-scale sculptural works, digital and XR art, photography, painting, installation, drawing and a soundscape. The public events programme at the same venue includes talks and workshops by artists, novelists and publishers. The exhibition space includes a small print and bookshop in partnership with Silver Press.

We are witnessing a resurgence of values that associate femininity with frivolity and subjugation. Ideas about ‘appropriate’ femininities continue to be used to police people’s bodies and lives. Our cultural climate pushes young women and femmes toward a nauseating overvaluation of youth, consumerism, romance, and idealised body image. In this age of instant (mis)information, relentless imagery and ever-evolving identities, one constant remains: femininity is deeply entwined with objectification.

In response, this show offers a small dose of sickly-sweet revenge. It creates a space to shed tiresome gendered tropes and invites us to explore what lies beneath charm—phlegm, blood, intestines. Yum. Through their varied practices as sculptors, sound, digital and XR artists, painters, writers, and publishers, these creators explore the notion of femininities beyond the body—even beyond the human.

Evoking and interrogating ideas of excess, power, and joy, the works in this exhibition celebrate ambiguity and reframe complexity and mess as the defiantly uncategorisable.