SPIRA9’s My Body is Dust, the second chapter of Othering, drifts through Asylum Chapel as bodies linger, rest, and return, where time settles like dust, and space remains quietly in use.
My Body is Dust takes place in London's Asylum Chapel, which is not an intact historic building, but a space that has been opened several times, then abandoned, and is still in view today. Its walls, glass windows, structure, and mutilations are like a body, changing over time. We don't want it forced to restore its original function, nor do we want to give it a new meaning. Instead, we want to let it enter a state of being used without being prescribed.
Based on Giorgio Agamben's (1942- ) The L’uso dei corpi, this book attempts to detach 'use' from function and purpose. Agamben points out that use is neither possession nor a completed act, but a state of being with something. In this sense, the body is not a subject, nor a starting point for action, but a being that is always in use. The exhibition will begin by exploring how the body enters a space, remains within it, and passes the time.
My Body is Dust: On Use, Residue, and the Living Afterlife of Space
My Body is Dust, the second chapter of SPIRA9’s Othering series, unfolds within the fragile and resonant architecture of Asylum Chapel not as an exhibition to be encountered, but as a condition to be entered. Curated by Zhang Junze, the project resists the exhibitionary impulse toward statement, resolution, or narrative closure. Instead, it situates art, bodies, and architecture within a shared economy of use, one that privileges duration over event, residue over image, and co-presence over representation.
Asylum Chapel is neither treated as a neutral container nor as a monument to be restored symbolically. Its peeling walls, scarred surfaces, and stained glass do not serve as atmospheric backdrops; they are active participants in the exhibition’s ontological field. The chapel is approached as a body, not a unified organism, but an accumulation of temporal states, interruptions, and survivals. In this sense, My Body is Dust aligns itself with currents of new materialism and generative philosophy, while also resonating strongly with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of use as articulated in L’uso dei corpi: use as neither possession nor function, but as a mode of being-with.
Within this framework, decay is not opposed to life, nor is regeneration framed as redemption. Dust, often read as the terminal sign of death, becomes here a circulating medium, a low-intensity persistence that binds body to space, memory to matter. Dust settles, is disturbed, inhaled, and redistributed. It carries no fixed meaning, yet it records everything. In this exhibition, dust is not an image but a condition: the material evidence of time passing through bodies and architectures alike.
The curatorial decision to scatter chairs throughout the chapel exemplifies this refusal of instrumental logic. The chairs do not instruct, frame, or choreograph viewing; they merely offer themselves for use or neglect. Sitting does not initiate spectatorship, nor does standing conclude it. The viewer’s body is not positioned as an interpretive subject tasked with understanding, but as a temporal presence-lingering, hesitating, repeating, wearing down. Viewing becomes intermittent, reversible, and contingent, unfolding as a sequence of minor acts rather than a coherent trajectory.
Across installations, performances, sound works, and material interventions, the invited artists engage processes of erosion, transformation, and instability. Works breathe, dissipate, shift position, or accumulate traces over time. Performances emerge without fixed schedules, resisting anticipation and documentation alike. Even the exhibition’s archival impulse, The nth Use, does not seek to stabilize meaning, but to register the accumulation of minute, often purposeless alterations: movements of chairs, changes in light, residues left behind by bodies passing through.
What distinguishes My Body is Dust is its insistence that life within a space does not originate from singular moments of activation, but from the slow accretion of use. The chapel is not awakened, nor is it given a new identity. It simply continues to be used, misused, worn, and re-entered. In allowing uncertainty, misinterpretation, and loss of clarity to remain unresolved, the exhibition proposes a quiet but radical ethic: that meaning need not be produced, only inhabited.
Here, art does not stand apart from life, nor does it attempt to symbolize it. Instead, it participates in a shared vulnerability to time. What remains after the exhibition is not a conclusion, but a residue, dust suspended briefly in the air before settling again, carrying with it the memory of bodies that were never fully present, yet never entirely gone.
By Olivia Shuay
Invited Artist:
13 God (Najah Westbrook) | Aida Pouryeganeh | Anastasia Neff | Blackout Collective (Valeriia Lakrisenko & Alexander Belov) | Charlotte Saint Cullen | Claudi Piripippi | Crimson DM Lily | David L. Stewart | Diane Eagles | Doğan Özdemir | Doupu | Eric A. Johnson | Eva Oleandr | Federico Tejeda | FINA FERRARA | Francesca Tomlinson | Giulio Cusinato | Grace Tenneh Kromah | Hannah Clarkson | Helga Borbas | Lily Ziwen Li | Lu Meng (Luna Meng) | Iola Hilliker | Irena Paskali | Jane Hatfield | Jelena Perišić | Joana Pereira da Costa | Judy Maxwell-McNicol | Katia Be | Kristina Rutar | Lara Gallagher | Lu Jin | Luca and Katrina Dayanc | Niah McGiff | Nikki Allford | Olesia Kryvolapova | Oyedeji Mohammed | Roseline (Jingyuan) Zhang | Sai Ma | Saud Baloch | Sarah Cherpreau | Shelley Lafferty | Silvia Braida | Victoria Julia Valentine | Yana Dmitrieva | Yeri Jun | Yiwen Liang
Opening Night Performance:
I. As we lay dying
Performance丨Juice Cui Santi Lowe Mega Geng Siqi Chen
Installation丨Juice Cui & Mega Geng
II. Rite in lingering ground
Performance丨Lanyun Huang(Finch)
III. Pulse: Jazz Improv.
Performance丨JAE-X
IV. When We Listen to Our Body through Emotions [II]
Performance丨Roseline (Jingyuan) Zhang
