Figures of Control brings together five artists whoexamine the figure through systems of containment,visibility, belief, memory and transformation. Across painting, photography and sculptural approaches to image-making, the exhibition considers how bodies and identities are constructed, regulated and disrupted through visual language.

Johannes Phokela establishes the exhibition’s conceptual point of departure by reworking Lucio Fontana’s Spatialist cut. Where Fontana’s ruptureopens onto an infinite, metaphysical space, Phokelainserts the figure into the void. Absence becomes occupied space, revelation becomes restriction. The figure is simultaneously exposed and contained,turning the modernist gesture into a meditation onborders, exclusion, history and power.

The exhibition then moves through different registers of control. Nedia Were’s spirals disrupt linear time, drawing on Kenyan cosmologies to propose cycles of return and continuity. Justin Dingwall subjects thephotographic image to physical intervention, using stitching to expose the ways beauty and the body are constructed and disciplined. Ebenezer Samuel Akinola’s Yoruba-inflected figures exist in states offlux, where movement and spiritual transformationresist fixed identity.

Ayobola “Zak” Kekere-Ekun extends the questioninto materiality. Through fabric, folding and relentless repetition, she constructs surfaces in whichmemory becomes physical. In Terrains of Memory,the fold operates as both structure and trace,accumulating histories of pressure, experience andtransformation.

Together, the artists complicate the figure as a stableor autonomous subject. Instead, it emerges assomething produced through forces that frame, contain, conceal and transform, while continuallycreating possibilities for resistance andreconfiguration.