The Vessel at PINK

PINK, up there with our favourite small galleries, presents one of its most exciting exhibitions to date, with London’s Chris Thompson transforming the second-floor space into an interactive environment that blurs sculpture, archive and stage set.

The Vessel is a site-specific installation that invites audiences to navigate an uncanny wooden structure – a huge specimen cabinet filled with the obsessions of a fictional DIY collector. Visitors navigate it like investigators might a haunted house, opening drawers, sliding panels and making strange discoveries from an abandoned past. Or perhaps a lost future.

You open compartments to find everyday items alongside institutional symbols. Golden eagles meet kitchen cutlery. Mammoth bones meet Metal Gear Solid. Objects, sound and video form a strange tapestry. Proof of something only the collector understands. Ideas of value, taste, preservation, violence and power lurk within the drawers, but the objects’ juxtapositions form an unstable language that resists a single reading.

This resistance carries into how The Vessel asks to be experienced. Instead of the passive behaviour expected in many galleries, it invites shared exploration as visitors show one another how to engage with the installation. The usual rules of art audienceship – don’t touch, don’t talk, keep your distance – are flipped on their head. Curiosity, conversation and collective discovery become the heart of the experience.

The exhibition is open on weekends from 2pm-6pm, and on weekdays by appointment.