The Approach is pleased to announce Hold Still, a group exhibition with Heidi Bucher, Hana Miletić and Rachel Whiteread. Spanning generations and diverse material approaches, the three artists are brought together through a shared sensitivity to surface, memory and the quiet residues of human presence across both public and private realms. Whether through textile, cast sculpture, or latex skin, each practice engages with acts of recording and translation—gestures that slow time and foreground the intimate traces of human activity that get left behind. Hold Still offers a sustained meditation on the architectures of care, containment and the fragile line between absence and form.
Brussels based Hana Miletić’s practice begins in observation—of everyday urban environments, unnoticed gestures and provisional repairs that form her ongoing series Materials. Translating these informal interventions into meticulously handwoven textiles, Miletić positions weaving as both a material and conceptual act of ‘care and repair’. Each work captures the friction between the personal and the infrastructural, where mending becomes an act of quiet resistance. The largest work in the exhibition from her Materials series is a woven composition that takes its form from a boarded up commercial unit situated on the nearby Bethnal Green Road. In the context of Hold Still, her practice draws attention to the unnoticed patterns that structure our environments, transforming them into slow, deliberate records of attention.
British artist Rachel Whiteread has built a sculptural vocabulary grounded in the act of casting absence. By taking impressions of the negative spaces of domestic objects and interiors—such as bookshelves, mattresses, notice boards, and even entire rooms—Whiteread makes voids visible. Her forms hover between the monumental and the spectral, revealing the emotional and spatial memory embedded within architecture. Often rendered in concrete, resin and rubber, her works are both solid and elusive, holding still the fleeting traces of everyday life. More recently Whiteread has begun to work with papier-mâché, as can be seen in the works in Hold Still, which have been produced from a composite of salvaged scrap paper collected from the artist’s home and studio. Turning her attention to this more delicate, ephemeral medium to echo the forms of everyday objects or architectural elements, Whiteread emphasises absence and the traces of human presence through textured, ghostly surfaces. Lingering between the preservation of form and feeling, her works exist at the edge of disappearance.
The late Swiss artist Heidi Bucher’s immersive latex casts, produced during the 1970s and 80s, are acts of reclamation and release. She referred to her process as “skinning”—peeling away walls, floors, and fixtures to create haunting, pliable membranes that retain every architectural imprint. These works serve as both documentation and exorcism, especially in relation to domestic or institutional settings marked by repression or control – proof that even the most rigid structures can be undone. Many of the fragments featured in Hold Still would have originally been part of a larger composition. Included in Hold Still are pieces originating from a wall or floor of the Herrenzimmer[gentleman’s room], Ahnenhaus[ancestral home] and from the Borg[Heidi’s studio at a former butcher shop in Zurich]. These haunting fragments, some of which have been brushed with her iconic mother of pearl pigment, preserve not only the geometric patterns of parquet or tile, but also the imprints of decades of habitation. Through her ritualistic process, Bucher transformed surfaces into vessels imbued with memory and psychic residue. Within Hold Still, her work resonates as a deeply physical response to that which remains.
Throughout Hold Still the works of Miletić, Whiteread and Bucher perform acts of translation via materially rich, often labour-intensive processes. The exhibition becomes a space where the personal and architectural intertwine, inviting the viewer to pause and encounter the forms not as static objects, but as an imprints, echoes or repairs.
Hold Still press release
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