Gabriella-Hirst

There is a room that belongs to this flat, which contains a sash window, two doorways, a lampshade, a fireplace, and stairs. Nothing out of the ordinary there. It was built in the early 1900s, as an Edwardian tenement for the growing working class population moving into the area, as Camberwell rapidly developed from rural to leafy to built-up inner city. The second storey was added later.

Somewhere during the summer of 2026, another room has slipped and become stuck in-between these two floors.

This other room occupies the same footprint, with wooden floors throughout and picture frames on the walls. Vertically mismatched, it overlays the first precisely, but with a physical lag. Experienced in a fast scroll on a screen, the spin on a fruit machine, or incorrectly projected celluloid film, there is a slice of the image above and partial image following on below that can be seen within the same frame. It creates a rudimentary collage, a looping transition, caught in momentary stillness.

Flat discs of coloured paper are stuck in the spherical paper lampshades. Printed floorboards are stuck onto the wooden floor. The photographs superimpose fragments of the original room, adding multiple representations of the space back onto itself. The first room is both there and not there. It is another misalignment, a patch-work of moments collapsed on top of one another.

Sara just fits within this newly inserted room. The picture frames, hung at gallery-standard, average eye-height, are split —trapped within the finite boundary of the first room’s ceiling. The viewer too is caught in the split frame. Compressed into the confines, it becomes easy to answer the proposition posed by the exhibition’s title; is having two rooms instead of one actually more room?

Driven by her desire to create additional space, the gallery itself has become less roomy. It is a paradoxical, absurd even, solution to the problem of wanting more room in a city characterised by house-shares and houses subdivided. Buildings are cut in half and half again — flat 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d. The installation is a spatial response to the squeeze felt by tenants throughout cities like London, or Lisbon.

Sara Graça is based between London and Lisbon, working across installation, sculpture, drawing, photography and film. Her practice pushes against conventions of secure individual identity, embodying qualities of impermanence and porosity that reflect a contemporary state of disorientation. Often grounded in the temporal and spatial conditions of its presentation, Graça’s work uses material constraints to underwrite a self-conscious approach to themes from daily urban life.

Recent exhibitions include Boa Good Sorte Luck, her first institutional solo presentation at Culturgest, Lisbon (2025) and other solos in independent spaces such as Yes, and, Waldemarstr421099berlin, Berlin (2026), toi, moi, la pluie, Goswell Road, Paris (2026), Bisi Bisi, A Certain Lack of Coherence, Porto (2022) and B Blossoms, Mala, Lisbon (2022).

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