Located in a building previously occupied by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Hiber Nation lies in a site with a rich history of resistance. This exhibition explores a revolution of rest, against grind culture, hyper-productivity, and the invisible burdens that ask us to keep moving even when our bodies, minds, and spirits want us to stop.
Developed by artist and lead curator ezhava ekabo donyi, in collaboration with producers and co-curators Juliet Cook and Monu as a part of their arts and culture programme Spider London, Hiber Nation brought together 18 artists in a poetic, immersive group exhibition that transformed the space into a refuge. At once tender and politically charged, the show imagines rest as a practice of collective survival.
Breaking the conventional static space of a white cube gallery, Hiber Nation materialises as and within a blanket fort, hosting artworks on vibrant mauve fabrics that sway with audiences moving through it. The relaxing space invites visitors to sit, rest, and play. A massage ball by artist #ffff00 was included, changing the act of viewing into a tactile and bodily process of self-care. Rather than solely representing rest, the exhibition stages the conditions for it.
This transformation of the gallery into an adult-sized blanket fort was developed with Kat Easto, whose background in fine art and set design shaped the exhibition’s distinctive visual language. The result was nostalgic and evocative, recalling the improvised architectures of our childhood. Memories surfaced almost immediately.
When did we stop building blanket forts? Why did we build them in the first place?
Hiber Nation posits the blanket fort as more than a model for play, imagination, and refusal; it becomes an architecture of internality against external impositions.
In this sense, Hiber Nation did not merely decorate or disrupt the gallery space; it questions the forms of structures around us. Against the softness of its interior, the harshness of London’s cityscape became more evident. The exhibition created a daydreamy, surreal environment that called for reflection, asking what kinds of spaces our bodies usually inhabit, and what kinds of spaces might allow us to recover.
In conversation, ekabo described the exhibition as a response to the challenges of life and art-making under capitalism.
“This show responds to the vastly different pressures of living and making art in a world that attempts to strip us of the playful and adventurous repose that we must all have a right to,”
ekabo says.
“Capitalist systems around us have begun the end of a world and we will pass through their apocalypse, sheltering ourselves in imaginations of care and hope”
That phrase, “in imaginations of care, and hope” captures the force and range of Hiber Nation. The exhibition was not naïve about exhaustion, nor did it romanticise collapse. Instead, it considered that tiredness can become a site of agency, especially when held collectively. Rest here was a shared political and emotional space.
The artworks in the exhibition are closely linked by theme, yet visually and materially distinct. Together they create an all-encompassing field of experiences: looping sonic lullabies, felted fluffy helmets, dreamy animations, paintings as portals, surreal sculptural interventions, a robotic pillow, and even an olfactory armpit. The show moves across chronic illness, motherhood, decolonial poetics, kink, memory, and fragmented identity, allowing the audience to drift between realities.
This commitment to difference was one of the exhibition’s greatest strengths. It created a dialogue between many forms and perspectives on rest:: rest as healing, as pleasure, as escape, as fantasy, as ritual, as protection, rest as repair. Each artist offered a different way of processing the overwhelming world around us.
Among the highlights, Becky Hoghton presented soft amuletic helmets shaped through the artist’s experience of chronic illness. These objects proposed comfort as protection and strength. Their softness became armour, suggesting that ease itself can be radical in a world that demands constant endurance.
Nurin Yusof offered a powerful performance. Situating herself within the imaginary country of Nurinasia, created to preserve a fragmenting identity in the face of homogenising globalisation, Yusof invited audiences to assist in “mending the self”. Through a relaxing ritual of sewing her ripped garment, the work transformed repair into a communal act where participants entered a tender process of restoration.
The wider programme extended the exhibition’s themes through live and moving-image events. Performances by Nurin Yusof and Zhen Zhen deepened the atmosphere of embodied reflection, while Media Club: Noah’s Archive and a film screening supported by Institut Français explored rest, crip time, and comfort. These programmes expanded Hiber Nation beyond the exhibition format, turning it into a cultural analysis.
The full artist list included Nurin Yusof, #ffff00, Zhen Zhen, negations, Arash Rafiei, Becky Hoghton, Faye Van Andel, Hannah Bailey, raj, Kennedy Schroeder, Jake Slipkovich, João Barreiros, not4m3, George Miller, Kat Easto, Jesse Rist, Cara Jones, and Scarlett Pochet.
The exhibition asked audiences to return to the blanket fort not simply as an image of childhood innocence, but as a self-made architecture of refuge: a space built when the world outside feels too loud, too hard, and too demanding.
In a culture that treats exhaustion as personal failure, Hiber Nation proposes rest as a collective right and a political language. The exhibition suggests that rest might be one of the first gestures toward another way of living: a quiet, communal, and deeply necessary dream of resistance.
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- #ffff00
- Arash Rafiei
- Becky Hoghton
- Cara Jones
- contemporary art
- Exhibition Review
- ezhava ekabo donyi
- Faye Van Andel
- George Miller
- Hannah Bailey
- Hiber Nation
- immersive art
- Jake Slipkovich
- Jesse Rist
- João Barreiros
- Juliet Cook
- Kat Easto
- Kennedy Schroeder
- London exhibitions
- Monu
- negations
- not4m3
- Nurin Yusof
- raj
- Scarlett Pochet
- Spider London
- Zhen Zhen
