SoiL Thornton / Jiajia Zhang

SoiL Thornton: Metabolizing eviction try, work_mp3 and other games of topping
SI is pleased to present Metabolizing eviction try, work_mp3 and other games of topping, the first institutional solo exhibition by artist SoiL Thornton in New York City, where they live and work. Crossing boundaries of media, Thornton’s work grapples with identity, systems of order, and regulative apparatuses. “Topping” implies relations of control and power, which unfold here in the dynamics and negotiations between artist and curator, artist and institution, artist and city, as well as between the artist, their peers, and their own artistic production. It is both a method and a condition.

Within this framework, meaning is broken down, processed, and transformed through lived circumstances shaped by precarious systems. The exhibition thus traces the fragile entanglements of life, labor, health, and property, reflecting on what can be made and upheld in their wake. Across the works, Thornton exposes fault lines where preordained answers foreclose possibility, asking instead what produces such limits and how they might be reconfigured. 

On the occasion of the exhibition, SI will present a performance by Violence on June 11, 2026 and an event with Hard to Read (date forthcoming).

SoiL Thornton (b. 1990, US) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Their practice crosses boundaries of media, ranging from sculpture, painting, and photography to installation and video. SoiL Thornton grapples with identity politics, diversity, productivity, systems of order, and regulative apparatuses. Recent solo exhibitions include: 8 Hours of Rest, The Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2026); candidate screening methods, Progetto, Lecce (2024); Choosing Suitor, Secession, Vienna (2023); and Decomposition Evaluation, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Bielefeld (2022). 

Metabolizing eviction try, work_mp3 and other games of topping is made possible through support from Every Page Foundation, and Paul Judelson.

Jiajia Zhang: Domestic News
SI presents Domestic News, the first institutional solo exhibition in the US by artist Jiajia Zhang. Centered on a newly commissioned five-channel video installation, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a rounded mirror chamber that stages a prismatic view of contemporary Shanghai. Through moving image, sound, and architectural elements, Zhang traces the circulations of a city tasked with staging the ambitions and contradictions of modern China, examining how spectacle, infrastructure, and everyday life move through the urban systems that sustain the contemporary metropolis.

Presented in New York, Domestic News places two imperial cities in dialogue. If Shanghai registers the velocity of ascent, New York offers a premonition of aftermath. The installation’s loop concludes where it begins, with an illuminated fountain and a refrain of celebration. Winter is over, spring is coming—a mechanism of return that renews itself without resolution. Celebration overwrites catastrophe. Empire appears not as a linear rise or fall, but as a rotating system: seasonal, infrastructural, and self-regarding. Within the mirrored chamber, spectators become part of this circuit, neither fully outside the spectacle nor fully inside it.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Swiss Institute will present a screening and conversation with Zhang and Aurelia Guo on May 1, 2026.

Jiajia Zhang (b. 1981 Hefei, China) lives and works in Zurich. With video, sculpture, and installation, Zhang creates a language of contemporary images that playfully transverse the permeable boundaries that new media creates, challenging our entrenched definitions and notions of private and public. She studied architecture at ETH, Zürich, photography at the International Center of Photography, New York, and completed her Master of Fine Arts at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in 2020. Her work has been part of numerous exhibitions, including at CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels; Fluentum, Berlin; Swiss Art Awards, Basel; FriArt, Fribourg; Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris; Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, St. Gallen; and Istituto Svizzero, Milan.

Domestic News is made possible through support from Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council, Zürcher Filmstiftung, rossogranada, Every Page Foundation, Ernst and Olga Gubler-Hablützel Foundation, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, and UBS Kulturstiftung.

Metabolizing eviction try, work_mp3 and other games of topping and Domestic News are curated by Alison Coplan, Chief Curator.