Curated by Art by Safari at Stolen Space Gallery (20-30 November 2025), the exhibition gathers works that excavate intimacy not as data but as architecture — the structures we build between bodies, between consciousness and material, between what we inherit and what we choose to preserve.
The exhibition interrogates how intimacy functions in an age of quantification in its full complexity: messy, humorous, chaotic, and occasionally subject to algorithmic tragedy. Yet it also asks a more radical question: what if love extends beyond the interpersonal? What if it names the relationship between hand and material, between memory and form, between viewers and creators? Here, across painting, sculpture, glass and mixed media, intimacy becomes material, written into layered textures, inherited through colour and pattern.
Helena Safari’s Genetic Factors positions this inquiry at its most foundational: what do we inherit when we inherit the capacity to love? Working with bold expressionist tonality and experimental color, Safari weaves together pop culture iconography and deeply personal family narratives, creating canvases where collective memory and individual longing refuse to separate.
This question of inheritance spirals outward through the exhibition. Oliver Hanney’s Amantes presents two figures locked in embrace, one crowned with a fruit-bearing tree, the other with branching antlers, while serpents coil around their bodies. Drawing from folklore, religion, and Jungian archetype, Hanney creates a visual vocabulary where spiritual sensuality meets aesthetic vision, excavating the mythological frameworks through which we learn to love.
But what happens when those frameworks collapse? Brogan Burke’s Forgotten Memories captures grief’s peculiar temporality through layered photographs of architectural spaces. The work freezes the viewer while the world accelerates around them, revealing how the places we’ve loved in transform as the people we loved there disappear.
Brea Cannady offers a different fracture. Her Double Evol literalizes the exhibition’s central provocation: love spelled backwards, refracted through digital fragmentation. The work captures how contemporary intimacy often feels—broken into data, transmitted, reconstructed on the other side of a screen. Yet there’s something tender in this pixelated breaking apart, a suggestion that even when love becomes unreadable, it remains insistent, refusing resolution.
Nadya Hristakieva’s Roots, Yvette Yujie Yang’s Fragments
If the first half of the exhibition maps intimacy between humans, the second half red
irects our attention to an older, slower form of connection — the love between consciousness and the natural world, between maker and material.
Nadya Hristakieva’s Roots embodies this expanded definition of connection. With a background bridging engineering, metaphysical science, and fine art, she constructs organic wooden forms that twist and interweave, suggesting the unseen networks that sustain all life. The sculpture asks whether we might extend the same vulnerability we offer other humans toward the earth itself.
Yvette Yujie Yang’s Fragments answers through lampworked borosilicate glass. Yang creates a “living memory archive” of delicate botanical forms that preserve fleeting moments against daily erasure. This specimen-making becomes resistance against entropy, a human effort to hold what must disappear. Each translucent plant captures both nature’s form and our impulse to remember it. Perhaps this desperate effort to preserve what we cannot keep is where emotion lives most purely.
Love Detected ultimately invites viewers to reconsider where intimacy resides. In this exhibition, love is not confined to romantic partnerships or even human relationships — it extends to the touch between hand and material, the connections that form across time when someone creates and someone else truly sees. As technology continues to reshape how we connect, these artists remind us that certain forms of intimacy remain untranslatable, unmeasurable, immune to optimization.
Exhibition Artists: Aria Luna , Helena Safari, Bianca Pirlog, Tiffany Wint, Yuna, Brogan Burke, PERSONA 13, Brea Cannady, Oliver Hanney, Ed Chapnah, Nadya Hristakieva, Yvette Yujie Yang
Courtesy of the artist and Stolen Space Gallery.
