The show will be open to the public:

Thursday 6 October - Tuesday 11 October 2022

weekdays 9:30am - 8:30pm, weekends 9:30am – 6:30pm

Slade School of Fine Art UCL, Gower Street London WC1E 6BT

more info here: Slade Interim Show 2022

The installation How to Fit In, comprised of photography, household objects and a pencil writing of wrongly interpreted proverbs, is a tongue-in-cheek commentary from an outsider’s perspective on the awkward situations when ‘tangled up in rhetorical footwork’. The deadpan images of resourceful yet not-so-successful repair hacks serve as a visual analogy to language slippages and cultural dilemmas when trying to fit in.

The installation developed as a progression of attempting to express concepts of displacement. Here, I compared the haphazard structures of improvised repair jobs with the clumsy mistakes of an outsider who is trying to belong by making use of local proverbs and getting them almost yet not quite right.

The selection of wrongly interpreted proverbs was based on mistakes I previously made or observed by other non-English speakers. For example:
‘Nearly is not good enough’, instead of ‘Almost is not good enough’, or ‘It’s not rock science’ instead of ‘It’s not rocket science’.
I used a pencil to write the proverbs on the wall to signify the temporality of language, as it is constantly evolving and changing. Just as the pencil can be erased, the language can be also corrected. Additionally, the pencil is also the preferred writing tool on the construction site for marking out various building processes.