Autopoiesis

A system appears not all at once but through depiction, error and return…

The Koppel Project is pleased to present ‘Autopoiesis’, an exhibition bringing together 14 upcoming artists to explore themes of systems, environments and the body that births itself within these loops.

The exhibition examines agency, chance and precision through a techno-biological lens.

MINKYUNG SUNG
Minkyung Sung is a multidisciplinary artist working across mechanical kinetics, painting, and material experiments. Drawing from the regimented structures of residential architecture, she uses concrete, salt, alum, metal, and found organisms to explore how controlled urban systems shape movement and desire of residents. Through repetitive gestures and shifting process, her works trace the fragile negotiation between utopian order and the lived, personal body within it.

VAISHNAVI SATHISH
Vaishnavi Sathish is an artist and poet based in London and Puducherry. she intends to bridge materiality and the politics of language through the visual arts and works with areas like auto-fictioning, language epistemology and body horror. She authored a poetry anthology titled ‘Sunflowers of the Dark’ at the age of 15. Her works are also published in various magazines like Poem Pajama’s Lost Memory, DelSlam’s Beetle and Summer Somewhere. She is drawn to things whose existence contradict their very possibility and subjects that, to her, portray raw, gruesome yet enticing aura of disgust. A disgust that she keeps at her disposal to lay the unseen bare with its ornate bones extruded.

ESHQ HASNATH
Eshq Hasnath is a multidisciplinary site and research based artist working across sculpture, writing, performance, print, video and installation exploring relations of subjectivities and relations and ways of dealing with colonial legacies as negotiations.

HARVEY DELL
Harvey Dell is currently focused on the creation of video games, specifically RPGs. Exploring the value of games as a medium, and their democratization in recent years. Their work conceptually explores salvation, ideological stagnation and birth as a means to understand one’s own psyche.

Currently working on an RPG, working title – “HOPE AND ENTROPY”. Exploring the idea of the “anti-game”. Set in a “second-world” after a cataclysm, you are a journalist working for an evangelical-esc publisher obsessed with salvation – returning to the old world. You explore surreal landscapes and meet strange characters in this leisure simulator.

BENJAMIN DARVILLE
Benjamin Darville is an artist and filmmaker based between London and Frankfurt am Main. Working with time-based media, Darville’s practice interrogates the vessel of cinema — exploring time, image, sound, space and memory.

His work has been part of exhibitions and screenings at the BFI, The Crespo Foundation, Deutsche Filminstitut and The Factory Project. While studying at Städelschule in Frankfurt and the Slade in London, Darville has developed work including The Child Who Fell Off the Face of the Earth, L' Acqua Xe Morta / The Water Is Dead and O (So Say the Circle is Round).

NADEZHDA KHALID
Nadezhda Khalid works across sound and visual media, using computational, rule-based systems as both tool and subject. Their process embraces automated structures, yet turns attention to failure in machines, human error and glitch. By treating error as material, they explore the tension between automation and human intention in art.

LYDIA GUI
Xirong Gui’s practice explores authenticity, belief, and emotional uncertainty through installation, video, and painting. Working with objects, images, and materials that exist in unstable states： between truth and imitation, presence and absence. Her work examines how meaning is shaped through projection, repetition, and distortion. Rather than treating value or emotion as fixed, the practice considers them as negotiated conditions emerging between the artwork and the viewer. Across different media, Gui reflects on systems of exchange, perception, and attachment, where uncertainty becomes a central mode of experience.

ELLEN WARNER
Fluctuating between moving image, writing, photography, and hypertext, my work is rooted in the quiet details of place and personhood. I am currently exploring:

the blue of distance, last light at sunset,

the edges of the world as we know it:

coastlines, stone circles,

ghosts of the Beeching cuts;

crossings over the Solway Firth.

and

things left unsaid -

spectres, geomagnetic storms

the lossiness and potency of memory,

the sensations of being in a body;

what it means to die, and to be alive,,,

I am working on an experimental hypertext-film and publication, “AUTOELEGY”, set in a twin-stranger-Britain, where hazy encounters and a polyphony of voices constellate into a story of mourning, haunting, and hope in the dark.

ARIA PAREKH
Aria Parekh is an artist exploring the intersection of poetry, sculpture and film to represent their upbringing shaped by both nature and technology. Their speculative work aims to explore a post-human world where technology feels more "natural" or helps the artist access unseen parts of landscapes they consider home. Their work aims to represent the feeling of being "grounded" in nature that they felt growing up in a biodiversity reserve, while also capturing the ephemeral, decaying quality of botanical life, creating a tension between calm rootedness and the disruptive imagery of transformation and decay.

EDIE FORRESTER
Edie Forrester explores the connections between horror, philosophy and takes interest in our relationship to non-human, ecological worlds, and on a formal level explores strategies of kinetic sculpture, detailed model making and tensions between figurative and abstract ways of representing thought.

Always at stake in Edie’s work is the capacity for the viewer to take a second look at what initially may come across as abject, or as producing a feeling of existential horror, to find something else beneath the initial encounter – a feeling of sympathy for what is otherwise rejected from human experience, or the discovery that we can bear to look again and discover something not so unlike ourselves.

YIPEI CHEN
Yipei Chen (b. 2002, Beijing, China) is a London-based artist working primarily in sculpture, video and graphic design. She earned her BA in Digital Media Art from the Communication University of China in 2024 and is currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Yipei’s work consistently seeks to reveal the instability and inherent agency of artificially produced, everyday objects that serve human use. Through processes resembling play—encounters, sampling, handling, adaptation, and negotiation—she captures the fleeting truths that materials evoke in assembly, guiding viewers to imagine aspects of the work that cannot be fully grasped or reduced to symbols or language. Employing a non-linear approach that resists representational frameworks, she anchors her practice in the immediacy of daily life and navigates it through the trajectories of personal experience and individual volition, generating a cognitive tension that opens space for randomness and personal narrative.

Yipei’s creative focus lies on the reconfiguration of subjectivity in the post-pandemic era, emphasizing the plasticity of boundaries and the logic of emergent intermediacy. By constructing dynamic fields between matter and subject, private and shared, spirit and flesh, she reveals the decentralizing turn in contemporary perceptual mechanisms—a posthuman mode of perception characterized by relationality, flux, and generativity.

ANNABELLE JI
Annabelle Ji is a new media artist based in London whose practice includes software and sensor-based installations. Their work investigates the jarring narrative between nature and technology.

Their research focuses on the biological metaphors of plants within human civilisation, and recent inquiries into architectural archiving. They are currently pursuing a BA in Art and Technology at The Slade.

ANIMESH BASNET
Animesh works at the intersection of code and art, using programming as a creative medium rather than merely a technical tool. His practice explores generative systems, algorithms, and data as ways to create visual and interactive works, often embracing unpredictability and process as integral parts of the final outcome.