Slippage at Artissima 2026

ss space space presents Slippage at Artissima 2026, an exhibition that considers flexibility not solely as the capacity to adapt to instability, but as a manoeuvre of negotiation through which new possibilities emerge. As the only Taiwanese independent artist-run space participating in this year’s edition, ss space space navigates the contemporary geopolitical conditions that shape the international visibility of independent art spaces in Taiwan. In this context, flexibility becomes more than a mode of operation: it is a means of sustaining a practice while continually seeking new ways forward.

Featuring three Taiwanese female artists, Sara Wu, Wen Gum Gum, and Nai-Jen Yang, Slippage approaches instability as a condition through which agency can be recalibrated and alternative possibilities negotiated. Bringing together more than twenty works across sculpture, photography, and painting, the presentation unfolds through a spatial rhythm of contrasting scales, materials, and dimensions. Through their distinct sensory syntaxes, the artists locate the instrumentality of their practices within ambiguity, exploring how shifts in perception can unsettle familiar structures and make space for overlooked possibilities.

Sara Wu reconfigures intricate assemblages of photography, sculpture, and found materials to suspend the distinctions between an object’s function and the histories or associations it might conceal. Displaced from familiar contexts, fragments of mundane objects become sites of renewed perception. Where Wu’s work displaces the materiality of the objects that surround us, Wen Gum Gum extends this reinterpretation to the representation of the body. By disconfiguring familiar visual codes of bodily experience and unsettling the boundaries between the recognisable and the representational, Gum Gum’s practice sustains a friction that disrupts the expectation for the body to exist within fixed categorisations. While Wu and Gum Gum’s works destabilise the registration of meaning, Nai-Jen Yang’s paintings invite its alteration over time. Built upon repetitive gestures and nuanced tonal shifts, her paintings resist the expectation of immediate recognition, inviting encounters that shift between proximity and distance.

Since its founding in Taipei in 2023, ss space space has developed its identity through an ongoing negotiation with the conditions of independent practice. Moving between artist-led research, exhibition-making, curatorial experimentation, and international exchange, the space occupies a position that is neither entirely fixed nor fully defined by established institutional or commercial models. “Operating an independent artist-run space today is not simply an alternative choice, but an urgent necessity,” notes Sean Tseng, co-founder of ss space space. “In an ecology increasingly defined by market imperatives and rigid institutional frameworks, independent spaces provide the crucial friction required to sustain uncompromised artistic inquiry. We must carve out platforms where instability can be harnessed as an active methodology rather than an obstacle.” Its trajectory has required a continual recalibration of perspective, method, and position. Within this process, flexibility is not simply a response to external constraints, but a condition through which the space sustains its commitments to artistic inquiry and care while cultivating relationships, seeking possibilities, and creating opportunities beyond the structures already available to it. The curatorial proposition of Slippage emerges from this ongoing practice. Its negotiation with instability reflects not only the artists’ distinct approaches to material, representation, and perception, but also ss space space’s own experience of locating agency within the shifting conditions and limitations that shape independent art spaces, particularly within Taiwan’s complex geopolitical and cultural context. Here, slippage becomes both a curatorial framework and a reflection of the space’s identity, a means of working within uncertainty without accepting existing boundaries as definitive.

Within Slippage, movement becomes more than a response to constraint; it becomes a method of discovery, bringing overlooked relationships into view and allowing alternative possibilities to take form. Across the artists’ distinct practices and the exhibition’s spatial choreography, slippage emerges not as a failure to maintain one’s position, but as an active negotiation with instability—one through which new forms of perception, agency, and connection may emerge.