For Zadie Xa, every exhibition is an installation: a singular immersive work; a magnificent family tree connecting an assembly of real and imaginary creatures, its roots and limbs reaching deep and wide across a multitude of worlds, its history non-linear and ageless. This exhibition entwines two blood lines: the first emerges from the exhibition Rough Hands Weave a Knife, a body of paintings and sculptures Xa made in early 2024, and the second develops from the project Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything (2025), made with artist and long-term collaborator Benito Mayor Vallejo. This work was first exhibited at Sharjah Biennial 16 and earned a nomination for the prestigious Turner Prize. This installation is the third iteration of this work.

Painting, central to Xa’s practice, incorporates a wide range of references, including art history, craft, speculative fiction, popular culture, music, and fashion. Korean folklore and mythology offer a rich visual and narrative framework and pay homage to matrilineal and women-led practices. Xa’s interest in textile histories can be seen in both the depiction of traditional Korean clothing or costumes worn by her characters and in the multicoloured patchwork panels that form the surfaces and frames of the works. These panels are composed of stitched scraps of painted canvas that echo the Korean quilting technique of bojagi, a centuries-old practice of repurposing scraps of fabric into new textiles used to cover, carry, or wrap objects for domestic and ceremonial purposes. Crafts such as bojagi embody traditional matrilinear knowledge with skills passed down through making rather than through language. For Xa, they situate her practice within a historical lineage of craft production and honours the women in her life.

Resembling the supernatural dreamscapes of Surrealism or science fiction rather than a specific geographic location, the liminal spaces in Xa’s paintings function as a means of remembering and honouring the landscapes of Korea, Vancouver, and the West Coast. Her ambiguous landscapes simultaneously capture the abstract and contradictory experience of belonging to many places and none at all: they confuse sea with sky, solid with liquid, they disorient and provoke. These landscapes attempt to articulate, perhaps, the closest approximation Xa has to feeling at home. This sense of disorientation extends to the installation itself: hand-painted walls and mirrored flooring fill the galleries with the colours of twilight and dawn, inspired by sunsets the artists witnessed on beaches in Al Hamriyah in Sharjah and in Vancouver, and echoing the shimmering hues and surrealist landscapes in the paintings. The effect of this immersive colour field is that we are no longer standing on the outside looking in, but inhabitants of Xa’s world itself.

Traversing these landscapes are central protagonists: animals, cetaceans, and hybrid creatures, who are joined by a series of Xa’s recurring characters, including the guardian, the warrior, the acrobat, the dancer, and the musician. Each plays a role in protecting, caring for, or entertaining both the living and the dead. Xa often depicts less regal and more maligned animals, like the fox, crow, or seagull, as well as whales and dolphins who have been held in captivity for most of their lives. These creatures are deeply impactful to the artist and are central to much of her work. Animal-human hybrids, pulled from mythology and folktales, shapeshift from one painting to the next and appear as parables, at times wreaking havoc in the form of misfortune or disease to avenge the mistreatment or destruction of the natural world or, if earned, offer protection from bad luck. Several paintings depict older women engaging in the Korean shamanistic practice of Salpuri, a graceful and cathartic dance that cleanses negative energy, releases sorrow, and washes away bad luck. The three figures stationed to welcome you into the gallery – Underworld Kin: Fox (2024), Underworld Kin: Orca (2024), and Underworld Kin: Seagull (2024) – are both guides to lead you into this liminal world, and advisors, to alert you to what lies ahead.

Seashells, found by Xa and Mayor Vallejo on beaches in Korea, Greece, and Sharjah, appear both symbolically and physically throughout Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything. Believed to be conduits to other worlds and communicative receptors, they are also symbolic of carrying your home on your back – because you belong everywhere and nowhere. Their coiled form is both a central design principle throughout the installation and a nod to the beaches close to where the first iteration of this work was presented. The centrepiece of the installation, Ghost (2025), is a suspended sculptural work made up of more than 1,000 brass bells arranged in the shape of a conch shell. Although conceived as a chime and inspired by Korean shamanic ceremonial rattles that evoke sounds of protection, this work, like its title suggests, remains silent. Instead, a faint aural presence emanates from four shells that anchor the corners of the space. Ear-to-shell, we might expect to experience the magic of hearing wind and waves; instead, we are connected to the ancestral echoes of our kin and the haunting language of whales. We hear the great-great-great grandmothers of beasts and birds speak through time, their knowledge carried by the wind held inside a tiny shell.

Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything is organized and developed in partnership with The Power Plant, Toronto where it will be on view from 16 October 2026 to 21 March 2027, and at PHI, Montréal from 21 April to 21 September 2027.