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What does it mean to memorialise something transient?

For Colorado-based artist Maia Ruth Lee’s first UK solo exhibition beginning on the Spring Equinox, we imagine the gallery as a worldly and spiritual centre. The presentation will explore human life in motion and feature objects as offerings from different exhibitors.

In Gallery 1, the five new sculptures that Lee will make at Primary will become part of her Bondage Baggage (2018 – present) series. The sculptures are intricate prototypes of luggage seen arriving at the Kathmandu International Airport, often owned by Nepali migrant labour workers from the Middle East, South and East Asia. They are often wrapped and bound in quotidian materials: cardboard, rope, textiles, and tape. The luggage is bound in ways that are difficult to tamper with, concealed and enforced by techniques that are characteristically unique. The masking of its contents would pose a threat to any Western standards of security measures and customs—the hand-woven luggage becomes remarkable objects that are, by design, an embodiment of anti-establishment and anti-imperial gestures. Blending the installation with traditions of public offerings, as seen in Korean jesa or at religious sites such as Buddhist monasteries within Nepal, Primary and Lee will invite our community to present luggage and other personal offerings alongside her sculptures.

A new large-scale artwork with a different presence will be featured upstairs in Gallery 2. A sixth green banner will deepen Bondage Baggage Banner (2024), a body of work made of imprints and markings of the bound luggage as seen in Gallery 1—the painted surfaces of the sculptures are stretched and smooth like skin—transformed into abstract traces and contours of the migrant experience. Lee will develop and workshop the banner with a group of local migrants, including Marwa Soliman, Hanan Shaikh, Maha Hadid, Shahlaa Al-Battawi, and Azza Elkareh, through Heya Nottingham. The piece will become a new addition to the existing five banners individually painted in black, white, yellow, blue, and red, corresponding to the five hues that constitute obangsaek, the five cardinal directions and elements in Korean traditional culture. The new addition of the green banner symbolises free passage, making it the colour of safety. The communal process of making the banner centred around the collective and human hand will weave together stories of migration, grounding and disorientating in equal measure. As British-Australian writer Sara Ahmed beautifully puts it in Queer Phenomenology (2006), ‘Hands…emerge as crucial sites in stories of disorientation…Hands hold things. They touch things. They let things go’.

Once we leave a place is it there, 2024

The original banners are part of Lee’s installation, Once we leave a place is it there (2024), curated by Clarice Lee, Malaika Newsome, Fiona Yu and Ruiqi Wang, and supported by Valeria Napoleone XX IFA at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York—an installation that was created as an intervention to colonial and imperial structures, and a space created for gradual metamorphosis and offering—in recognition and honouring of migrants known and unknown. Drawn from poet Myung Mi Kim’s Under Flag (1991), the installation echoes the poet’s reflection on her journey as an immigrant, mirroring some of the narratives that Lee responds to. At Primary, this installation takes on a new energy and form, translating and responding to urgent immigration issues at home in Nottingham.

So here, we ask you, Maia, and ourselves again: ‘What does it mean to memorialise something transient?’

Human Life in Motion is supported by the Bagri Foundation and Henry Moore Foundation.

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