grievous ghosts / Arcadia Missa
with Anh Van Trån
The title of this exhibition is drawn from a description by residents of My Lai, Vietnam, of how they continued living alongside ‘grievous ghosts’, ‘invisible neighbours’ and ‘the spirits of the dead in pain’, following the 1968 massacre by the US army. This detail appears in the chapter on trauma in Hannah Proctor’s 2024 book Burnout, where she explains that the classification of PTSD symptoms – flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts – as well as the way it acts as a diagnostic category for responses to everything from “natural” disasters to genocide to motoring accidents – resulted in an anti-representational convention of the void, abyss, aporia or black hole to depict the mind of the suffering individual.
Against this emptying out of representational detail, Herbstein and Trần ask us to listen to the “grievous ghosts” of history. By making two distinct bodies of work with their own aesthetic conventions and modes of production socialise with one another, the exhibition seeks to emphasise materials and objects as carriers of history.
Trần’s Still Life with Dead Game and Flowers in a Vase Glass, 2025 and Abstract Painting (DE – UK) II, 2025 resist the historic boundaries of abstraction, with their conjuring of physical space here emphasised through their placement in relation to Herbstein’s wooden viewing apparatus. This structure, entitled framework (London) is made from wood collected from construction sites and skips, which is then set into moulds and cut down to size, becoming a new, composite material fusing together materials and labour with distinct histories and origins.
Beyond its material history, the shape and size of framework (London) also layers up traces of the past, mimicking the architectural blueprint for the building which formerly existed in this space before being bombed during the Blitz. In this sense, framework (London) structures the gallery space, the window, the city and Trần’s paintings, while insisting on a relationship to the past lives of the building. Set against the modest geometry of Herbstein’s apparatus with its reclaimed materials, the expressive fluidity of Trần paintings summon a different kind of salvage. Seeking to mediate the cliché of painterly gesture as untrammelled access to the self, Trần explains she is thinking about “markmaking as coming from Western painters”, a project which combines and alludes to a variety of traditions, from medieval panel painting to the Dutch still life. In Still Life with Dead Game and Flowers in a Vase Glass, her scratchy flashes of gold invoke the history of how the most prized Christian subjects attained representation with the most valuable pigments, while the chalky whites, pinks and greens stand in for flowers, and liquescent brown for a hare. This is an approach to artistic inheritance that corresponds with Herbstein’s palimpsest-like framework and the way her series strike takes lead from old roofing sheets and makes impressions of taps, screws, the hammer hitting metal within these lumpen slabs, gathering an accumulation of lives and labour within the work. Instead of a void, history accumulates.
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