From 6 to 9 August, the group exhibition DoMo Collective’s Unanchored City was held at Copeland Gallery in Peckham, London.
Curated by DoMo Collective, a group formed by Korean curators and creative producers based in London, the exhibition brought together 16 emerging London-based artists from a range of national and cultural backgrounds, working across painting, sculpture, installation, video, sound and multimedia. The exhibition begins with the question, ‘What makes a city feel like our own?’ It explores how each person experiences and remembers a city differently, through memory and movement, the way we see and what we desire, and our sense of belonging or not belonging. The exhibition was divided into five themes, with visitors free to move around the gallery and connect different works and fragments of stories in their own way.
The programme also included Scoring Copeland Through Soundwalking, a participatory soundwalk workshop in which visitors searched for, recorded and explored the sounds and hidden rhythms of Copeland Park. A short play, As You Wish, turned the familiar setting of a job interview into an absurd situation to explore urban anxiety and invisible systems of evaluation. Together, these events extended the exhibition beyond visual art, offering ways to experience the city through sound, movement and performance.
Unanchored City focuses on the experiences of individuals living in a city. For some, a city is home. For others, it may be somewhere they stay for a while before moving on, or somewhere they may never feel they have fully arrived, no matter how long they live there. The idea for the exhibition came from the members of DoMo Collective, who realised that although they all live in London, each experiences the city differently. For them, the city is a place where memories and experiences build up, while our sense of identity and belonging continues to change. This idea also connects closely with Peckham, an area shaped by a long history of migration and movement and one that continues to change rapidly today. The exhibition asks what makes someone feel that a place is their city, or why they may live there yet never feel they fully belong.
These questions take shape through the exhibition’s five themes: Memory and Absence, Gaze, Liminal Passage, Desire and Language and Mutation. The city we remember becomes fragmented and is reassembled over time. Even familiar places can feel strange depending on where we look from and how far away we look at them, while the boundaries of the city become less clear as people continue to move. Signs, advertisements and words form the language of the city. They seem to guide us, but sometimes they can make us feel even more lost. Within all of this, individuals constantly try to understand where they stand. And as we experience the city, we too gradually change. The five themes are separate but also overlap and connect. Without a fixed route through the exhibition, visitors move between the works and connect these fragments of the city in their own way.
The works that stand out in the exhibition are those that capture moments of movement, change and disappearance rather than fixed forms. Ken Chung’s Noise of Memento (2025) is a large kinetic installation made of stainless steel, motors and hook-and-loop material. The structure, around five metres long, rotates with the help of motors, while its long hanging materials hit and rub against each other, creating unpredictable movements and sounds. It seems to follow the same path, yet its shape and sound change from moment to moment, just as memories can change slightly each time we return to them. Chung has continued to explore memory and anxiety, as well as the relationship between people and objects. Rather than remaining still, the work moves on its own and changes the atmosphere around it, reflecting the sense of a city where things are constantly appearing and disappearing.
The feeling of trying to hold on to something but never quite being able to is even more direct in Cameron Jarvie’s [Flow] (2026). The work projects words onto running water. On a flat screen, the words would appear clear, but on the water’s moving surface they cannot keep their shape. Even when they briefly become visible, they shake and blur with the water before flowing away. We can see the words, but we cannot hold them as a fixed image. Language, which is meant to communicate meaning, becomes uncertain when it meets a surface that never stops moving. In the same way, the city constantly speaks to us through signs, advertisements, instructions and rules, but their meaning can change depending on who receives them and when.
Joonhong Min’s Ephemeral Tableaux III (2026) creates a space by adding acrylic and pen drawings to discarded or found objects. Objects that have already been used elsewhere and bear traces of time become part of a new landscape. In a city that changes quickly as old things are constantly replaced by new ones, discarded objects can also hold small memories of the places and people that came before. While Noise of Memento shows the unstable nature of memory through repeated movement, and [Flow] presents language that cannot be held still on running water, Ephemeral Tableaux III gathers objects that might otherwise have disappeared and brings them together in a temporary landscape.
In different ways, all three works show how things in a city constantly appear, move and disappear, and how our memories and senses are reshaped along the way. Set among the works in the exhibition, Coordinates of Ghosts, a collaborative performance by Joonhong Min and choreographer Dona Kim, uses bodily movement to trace invisible memories and traces left behind in urban space.
If the city’s landscape, memories and language are constantly moving and changing, how does an individual find their place within it? Written and directed by Annie Kyung, As You Wish explores the anxiety and confusion of urban life through the experiences of two people. Two ladders stand in the gallery alongside the artworks. Isabella Victorie climbs one of the ladders, sits at the top and opens a newspaper. Sounds of the city begin to mix: the voice of a newsreader and the noise of the Underground. Then Donghyun Lim appears with a large backpack and pushes his way through the visitors in the gallery. Suddenly, the performance begins.
The person at the top of the ladder turns the pages of the newspaper, throwing out lines from news stories, advertisements, notices and weather reports. Sitting on the other ladder, the man looks confused but still tries to come up with the best possible answer. He watches the other person’s expression, asks questions and corrects himself as he tries to work out what is expected of him. As the performance continues, the person above speaks less and less, and the sound of newspaper pages turning fills the silence. The person below, meanwhile, begins to speak more and more. Even though no one has forced him to do so, he starts creating his own questions, answering them and explaining himself.
One phrase is repeated throughout the performance: “As you wish”, which is also the title of the play. ‘As you wish’ sounds generous, as though it gives the other person the freedom to choose. Yet the person below has almost no chance to do what he actually wants. Instead of saying what he wants, he tries to guess what the other person wants and struggles to fit himself to rules he does not understand. The person above never tells him what to do, but he gradually begins to create his own rules and control himself. What sounds like a considerate phrase does not, in fact, give him freedom. As the performance goes on, it becomes harder to tell whether he is following his own wishes or someone else’s.
As You Wish makes the audience experience this discomfort for themselves. The two ladders in the middle of the gallery separate the two people and make the difference between above and below immediately visible. The sound of newspaper pages turning, the noise of the city and the movement of visitors through the gallery make communication even more difficult. There is something both tense and sad about watching the person below refuse to give up on the conversation, even as the questions and answers keep missing each other, and trying to make sense of it all. The absurdity can be funny at first, but at some point it begins to remind us of situations we may have experienced ourselves, and the laughter slowly fades.
As You Wish most clearly reflects the theme of Desire and Language, but it also connects with the other sections of the exhibition. The person below tries to understand an unfamiliar language (Gaze), keeps searching for the next set of rules without ever fully arriving at anything (Liminal Passage), and changes himself in the process (Mutation). Eventually, even what he wanted in the first place begins to fade (Memory and Absence). As You Wish was a short play that brought together all five themes of the exhibition and showed how they can work on a single individual.
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