Common Ghosts

Emerging in 2023 from a Critical Forum run by Lux, the Deluxe collective launches its first full exhibition on 5th November, 6.00 – 8.00 pm and closes with an afternoon of performance on 15 November. _Common Ghosts_ explores zones of uncertainty, where perception falters. As subject and as material, the exhibition reflects on ecologies of hauntings: cultural and individual; time, memory and presence. Its purposeful juxtaposition of insubstantial and material media suggests intervals between visibility and invisibility, the immaterial not as an absence, but as a site of resonance. Humour, imagination and a range of sensation and emotion are at play. Shifting between the ephemeral, the physical and the literal, the exhibition dwells in the dialogue between the almost hidden cultural, textual and sensual, and our understanding of what is real, remembered, or imagined. The poetics of opacity, translucency, abstracted sound, document and memory become guiding principles, what resists being seen, what allows partial visibility, and what exists in the in-between. _Common Ghosts_ attunes to flickers and afterimages. It invites a slower form of attention, one that recognizes the unseen forces that quietly contour perception. ‍ Lives lived, sensual and imaginative response to change and loss is central. ‍ In _Being and Absence_ (2022-6) by **Yukako Tanaka** the breathing and voices of those who are no longer with us are experienced through multiple parametric speakers generating linear sound. This allows the sensing of existence within absence - a portal between past and present. ‍ ‍ **Lynn Dennison** uses story-telling, still and moving image in _In Search of Lost Time_ (2025) to explore the loss of the real in LG-11 limbic encephalitis that steals away patients' memory, capturing first-hand experiences in this collaborative project with clinician scientist Dr Tom Miller. ‍ ‍ **Felicity Allen**'s _Voiceover_ (2026) dwells on living with her dead mother, imaginatively present for over sixty years, embodied in the act of hanging laundry to dry. Two watercolours in her _Dressing Up To Be an Artist_ series are an attempt at revisionist history, a battle between text and image in a sometimes othered medium. ‍ ‍ Cultural, social and institutional structures are the target too of **Jan Kaminski**'s installation _Sodom_ (2026) which poses questions about volatile and transgressive desires and their relationship with culture and order: asking how desire and destruction are mutually dependent. By bringing ancient texts into modern times he questions what this act could mean. ‍ ‍ The body as temporal object is the departure point for **Rob Lye**'s spatial sound installation (2026) which, through episodic movement between sound and silence, considers presence as something temporary, held together through time before dispersing. ‍ ‍ The playful, imaginary and social are integral. ‍ ‍ **Chloe Langlois** draws on clowning, folk rituals, school plays, vaudeville and the occult to interact and communicate with her Holy Guardian Angel, Hot Snakes. Magikal instrument made with Wojciech Rusin and reenactment of The Headless Rite at a 24 hour Gnosis held at TACO! as part of Hot Snakes Night Club (2026). ‍ ‍ **Kate Mahony**'s live performances _Party in the Park_ and _Gazebo in the Park_ (both 2026) are based in her late father's career as a Children's DJ at his annual community party. The work considers her relationship to performance, community, memory and precarious housing. ‍ ‍ **Rhona Eve Clews**' film _Cosmic Goo: A short film about ectoplasm_ (2026) blends speculative enquiry with spiritual misadventure, taking a playful swipe at this slippery, shape-shifting subject. It traces an understandably unreliable account of haunted Victorian tissue-emanations through the aesthetics of high street slime and lo-fi magic tricks. ‍ ‍ The exhibition combines the politics of natural, human and material ecologies. ‍ ‍ In _Strandlands_ (2026) **Adonia Bouchehri** explores the unstable space between physical matter and representation, two and three dimensions, found and made objects and different processes of transformation. In this loose constellation no single register establishes itself as more real than another. ‍ ‍ In _Turn in the River_ (2026) **Sabrina Fuller** explores the depths of the River Thames, using still and moving image, sound, text, drawing and river objects to produce blurrings, mergings, returns and repetitions. Objects decay along with representation, words, echoes and meaning. ‍ ‍ The instability of meaning is explored in **Cheimi Shimada**'s _Kleroterion_ (2026), questioning of what constitutes democracy through an observation of the workers and machines of the pachinko parlour Rakuen. ‍ ‍ **Amanda Loomes** uses sleight-of-hand editing in _Waste Material_ (2025) to magically erase our waste, leaving only a sense of disquiet in this lament to a consumer society, echoed by the emptiness of the mysterious distribution centre and its ephemeral content in _Distribution_ (2026). ‍ ‍ **Sun Park**'s _Rehearsal for a Poem_ (2023) is an exercise in reading traces, silences and ghosts through three handmade, charcoal-covered books intended to be touched, stained and destroyed. ‍ ‍ Deluxe is a collective of thirteen active artists all loosely working with film, and all based in London with native connections to different countries and continents as well as the UK. Its contributors represent a wide range of experience and interests reflected in our extensive age range, from 20s into 70s.