Down The Rabbit Hole

A group exhibition featuring artwork by the late Katya Kan (1987 – 2023) in dialogue with creative contemporaries and emerging artists, to be confirmed. The exhibition will take place in London’s Crypt Gallery, which is set in a labyrinth of underground tunnels. The metaphorical ‘rabbit holes’ unfold to reveal displays of multidisciplinary art including painting, sculpture, works on paper and video, extending to performance and music at the closing event. “I almost wish I hadn’t gone down the rabbit-hole – and yet – it’s curious, you know, this sort of life!” Lewis Carroll, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland ​ ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ is a curatorial exploration of solitude, dislocation, and psychic transformation during the Covid-19 era. At its centre is Katya Kan’s pivotal watercolour ‘Spacetime’, an image of Iceland’s Diamond Cave pierced by her recurring bunny alter ego. Both whimsical and unsettling, the rabbit figure gazes from a crystalline tunnel stretching toward infinity—an allegory of confinement where the light at its end signals not release, but the stillness of suspended time. Alongside ‘Spacetime’ is Kan’s ‘Catastrophes’ series, a body of work that stages lockdown as both spectacle and slippage. At its centre emerges the bizarre theatre of a real-life, public school educated cannabis dealer, transfigured into a figure with a leopard’s head. Immersed in the languor of confinement, he reclines for hours in a bathtub, absorbing the spiralling conspiracy diagrams of American ufologist Abbie Richards. These tangled visual maps evoke not only the paranoia and absurdity of pandemic speculation but also the algorithmic entanglements of the internet itself—those endless “rabbit holes” where social media loops, hashtags, and recommendation engines draw the isolated subject ever deeper into echo chambers of speculation. Around him, watercolour crystallises into decadent chambers—a kaleidoscope of glam-rock indulgence, sloth, and surreal detachment—mirroring the intoxicating allure of digital overstimulation that masked fatigue with infinite scroll. Within these scenes, Kan’s rabbit-avatar moves fluidly between observer and accomplice, a wry embodiment of the user drifting between voyeurism, complicity, and surrender to algorithmic drift. In this hall of mirrors, pandemic lethargy becomes both spectacle and contagion, refracted through the cultural architectures of the internet age. Completed during the Artak Residency in Iceland in 2020, Catastrophes distils lockdown’s paradoxical moods: decadent stillness, comic estrangement, and a psychic theatre where decay, survival, and digital delirium overlap. To expand this dialogue, ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ includes affiliated artists whose practices similarly reflect on solitude, memory, and psychodrama during the pandemic. These voices— working across painting, digital media, and installation—create a chorus around Kan’s work, underscoring how Covid-19 reshaped not only private lives but also the emotional vocabulary of a generation. Together, their artworks become fragments of a shared archive of confinement and resilience.