Rites for a New World

Image credit: Take Me Home Tonight, install view. Photographer: Gillies Adamson Semple. Image courtesy by MARIA.

Private view: Thursday 15 May, 6–9pm

Show runs from 16th May until 15th June 2025.

Rites for a New World brings together four early-career artists, Brutus Labiche & Ayomide Tejuoso, MARIA, and Xueting Chen, whose works offer compelling visions for how we might live, heal, and relate in a time of transformation.

Each gallery is an immersive installation grounded in distinct lived experience and mythology, yet they intersect on shared themes of digital intimacy, climate precarity, migratory imaginaries, and ancestral resonance. These rites pay tribute to the cultural, and communal work of imagining and creating new ways of being.

Developed through a 198CAL open call, the exhibition responds to urgent social, political, and ecological questions. From speculative futures and sacred rites to collective memory and lived experience of the body, the featured works propose new vocabularies for care, resistance, and becoming.

Featured Artists

Brutus Labiche & Ayomide Tejuoso, MINA

MINA is a multi-sensory Black feminist installation tracing the journey of the mythic figure MINA through sacred space, ritual architecture, and photographic relics. Inspired by ancestral dreamscapes and kinship, this work builds an evolving mythology centering Black femme cosmologies and embodied memory.

Sandra Habiyambere (Brutus Labiche) and Ayomide Tejuoso are visual artists, writers, and researchers based in Vevey and London, respectively. Their collaborative methodology is grounded in Black diasporic feminist frameworks, material experimentation, and recursive dialogue.

Together, they have created MINA: a long-term, research-driven mythology composed of photographs, films, sculptures, essays, performances, and installations. Through sociological and conceptual art systems, they construct mythologies that affirm and archive Black feminine epistemologies.

They understand research as art and art as the manifestation of belief. Their collaborative process values experimentation, rigor, and intimacy, privileging the speculative, the emotional, and the symbolic. Through recursive image-making, they generate culture, belief, and cosmology.

MARIA (Maria Joranko), I FEEL LOVE

I FEEL LOVE is an intimate installation exploring queer embodiment, chronic illness, and protest in speculative futures. Through scent, sculpture, sound and video works (including TAKE ME HOME TONIGHT and YOU ARE NOT ALONE) MARIA weaves together personal and collective rituals of survival, touch, and care.

MARIA (b. Pierre, SD, USA) is a high-femme Latine/American writer, performer and artist who moonlights as a karaoke host. She builds and writes sculptural installations, performances, video and sound that eviscerate and reassemble the intersections of solidarity, chronic illness, race and their respective cosmologies in relation to speculative worlds. By using herself and the body with its endless potentials and failures as a conduit and muse she shatters through mediums to reflect the shifting nature of self-growth and conceptions of reality. She combines and oscillates between natural and digital materials to engineer and imagine radical bodily connections between cyber and organic networks as sites for liberatory seeds. MARIA nurtures these by diving headfirst into exploring pain (bodily, emotional, communal, spiritual) and its possibilities as a grounding for transformation and transmutation.

MARIA was formerly based in Columbus, OH and while there, was a member of MINT Collective. Currently she is based in London, UK and has completed her MFA from Goldsmiths with Distinction (2022) and is the 2023 recipient of the Goldsmiths Award|Acme Early Career Award, Bursary, and Residency. Her work has been shown internationally with shows i know it’s the end & I am full of beauty (2021) at Beeler Gallery at CCAD and #SpeakingThroughMasks (2020) at ABCNoRio in NYC and Oracles and Algorithms at Copperfield Gallery (2022). She also has recently opened shows in 2024 at Kupfer Projects and Studio Chapple (solo). Her work will be seen next at Cynefin in Athens and Rally Music Festival. 

Xueting Chen, YOU! Where Do You Seek Medical Care?

Xueting’s haunting fog-based installation, YOU! Where Do You Seek Medical Care?  is inspired by traditional mist therapy and spiritual healing practices. Combining scent, sound, and ephemeral materials, Xueting’s work meditates on ecological memory, breath, and bodily fragility in the face of systemic violence and environmental collapse.

Xueting Chen (China) is a London-based interdisciplinary artist. Her practice inhabits the fragile boundary between structure and collapse, between the spiritual and the industrial. Drawing from a background in both civil engineering and fine art, she creates sculptural installations that mimic, interrupt, or mourn systems of construction, decay, and transformation.

At the heart of her work is a refusal of material expectation. Xueting often works with what she calls “fragile concrete”: a hybrid substance born from interrupted chemical reactions and broken structural logic. Appearing solid yet inherently brittle, concrete becomes both industrial and intimate, a site of memory, failure, and quiet resistance. Through pouring, molding, imprinting, and erosion, she embeds traces of flora, animal footprints, terrain, and imagined relics—a speculative fossil record of the technological age. Her installations often manifest as fictional ruins landscapes as spaces of mourning, belief, and soft rebellion. Xueting approaches making as both ritual and as a quiet defiance. Her works open space for ambiguity, where materials are allowed to remain in flux: pure, slow, and undone. She continually returns to the question: What does it mean to build with care? To construct gently? To let structures fail with dignity?

About the Open Call

198 Contemporary Arts and Learning is pleased to announce the selected artists for Rites for a New World, a group exhibition developed through our recent open call.

We received a wide range of powerful submissions that engaged deeply with the urgent social, political and spiritual questions shaping contemporary life. The proposals reflected a shared commitment to reimagining how we live, relate and repair, with many artists addressing themes such as climate justice, migratory experience, new technologies, and virtual intimacy.

Following a careful and considered selection process, we have invited four artists to contribute to the exhibition. Each project brings a distinct perspective, but collectively they resonate with the wider concerns of how we honour transformation, resilience and care in a time of upheaval.

This open call was specifically aimed at early career artists, reflecting 198CAL’s long-standing commitment to nurturing emerging talent through professional development and artistic mentorship. Alongside the exhibition, selected artists will receive curatorial support and guidance, creating a framework for growth, experimentation and sustained practice within a supportive community context.

Rooted in our Brixton-based space and informed by a commitment to the Global Majority, 198CAL continues to support artists who challenge dominant narratives and offer space for collective reflection and experimentation. 

The jury panel included:
Nimco Kulmiye Hussein (Artistic Director), Shane Sutherland (Curatorial Assistant), Hodan Omar Elmi (Guest Juror)