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Maia Ruth Lee | Human Life in Motion: Primary, Nottingham

Current exhibition
21 March - 31 May 2025
  • Overview
  • Installation Views
  • News

Maia Ruth Lee | Human Life in Motion: Primary, Nottingham

Current exhibition
21 March - 31 May 2025
  • Overview
  • Installation Views
  • News
Overview
Human Life in Motion, Maia Ruth Lee, exhibition view, Primary (2025).
Human Life in Motion, Maia Ruth Lee, exhibition view, Primary (2025).

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’.

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Installation Views
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 088
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 101
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 001
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Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 003
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 002
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 010
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 032
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 059
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 088
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 101
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 001
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 009
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 003
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 002
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 010
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 032
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 059
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 088
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 01 04 25 Maia Ruth Lee Human Life In Motion Lowres 101

Human Life in Motion, Maia Ruth Lee, exhibition view, Primary (2025). Exhibition contributors: Maia Ruth Lee, Olivia Oyamada, Sofia Yala, Jade Foster, Raghavi Chinnadurai, Palani Studios/People's Archive of Rural India; Marwa Soliman, Hanan Shaikh, Maha Hadid, Shahlaa Al-Battawi, and Azza Elkareh from Heya Nottingham. Courtesy of the artist and Primary, Nottingham. Photo by Reece Straw.

News
  • Review | Maia Ruth Lee: Human Life in Motion

    Review | Maia Ruth Lee: Human Life in Motion

    Corridor8 April 25, 2025
    The edges of the city of Nottingham can feel decidedly grey when overcast, not least in the areas surrounding Primary. In amongst the grey, housed...
    Learn More

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