Return of the Repressed was an independent exhibition curated by Toby Ziegler and presented across three floors of a vacant office block on Heddon Street, London.

The touchstone for the exhibition was a life-size plaster figure made by Antonio Canova in 1807 and strategically studded with hundreds of small bronze pins. Resembling a proto-digital 3D scan, the figure describes a form by reducing it to points in space, which Canova then transcribed to marble using a pointing machine. It is simultaneously the thing and the code that describes the thing.

The exhibition took this as a starting point for a wider exploration of corporeality, alienation and abstraction in relation to late capitalism, digital technology, AI and social media. For the exhibition, a 1:1 copy of the Canova figure was 3D-printed and its bronze pins manually inserted.

Works by artists and non-artists were brought into a series of constructed triangular rooms, creating conversations between art objects, videos and objects from outside the art world. Many of the works shared a Frankenstein-like logic of deconstructing and reassembling familiar forms in an attempt to produce new possibilities for comprehension, while others operated as counterpoints or puncta.

The provisional architecture functioned like a film set. Emerging from it, the viewer entered a larger, more dilapidated space where the triangular room could itself be apprehended as an object, with a drone hovering around it.

Including work by:
Gillian Carnegie, Ella Fleck, Katrin Hanusch, Hannah Levy, Tatsuo Miyajima, François Morellet, Frida Orupabo, Ahren Warner

And work not by:
Richard Artschwager, Samuel Beckett, Antonio Canova, Nicolas Poussin, Yan Zhenquing

The work shown by Katrin Hanusch:
Wiped (Free Palestine)