Sohaila Baluch: Notes on Entanglement
14 - 30 January, 2026
HAPAX welcomes Sohaila Baluch and Akin Oladimeji to HAPAX Living Room, our West London space dedicated to showing new or experimental forms of lens-based art
Notes on Entanglement brings together a film and photographic works by Sohaila Baluch that consider how memory, grief and inheritance are carried across generations. The exhibition centres women’s voices, bodies and domestic forms of knowledge, attending to what is passed on unevenly, held in fragments, or carried without resolution.
The film Notes on Weight moves through overlapping voices, Baluchi oral histories, a daughter’s clinical language of anatomy and the artist’s own voice, to trace grief for an absent mother and the wider inheritance of land, language and loss.
Alongside the film are large-scale photographic images of Baluchi dresses titled Shahida and Tahira, named after women in the artist’s family. Printed without bodies, the garments hold presence through absence, marking a matrilineal line shaped by care, substitution and continuity after loss.
Akin Oladimeji's micro prose poems will intervene in the space by punctuating the works with his reflections on the themes.
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OPENING EVENING AND CONVERSATION
Join us on the 14th of January from 5pm to experience the lens-based works of Sohaila Baluch (PhD funded by London Arts and Humanities Partnership) exploring inheritance, grief and the weight of lived histories.
At 6:15pm, there will be a conversation with curator and writer Akin Oladimeji (PhD funded by London Arts and Humanities Partnership), academic Timothy Matthews and arts writer Dale Berning Sawa, reflecting on the exhibition’s themes and the ways their writing resonates with the work. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A with the artist and curator.
The exhibition runs from 14th January to 30th January 2026. Viewings are available Monday to Friday between 10:00 AM and 5:30 PM by appointment. Please contact the organiser if you would like to visit outside of the open events.
Event: Sohaila Baluch Exhibition and Conversation
Address: HAPAX Living Room, 1st Floor, Empress Studios, 17 Empress Place, London SW6 1TT
14th January 2026 : From 5 pm. Please see EVENTBRITE for registration and details.
15th-30th January : Exhibition continues by appointment (via editors@hapaxmagazine.com )
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SPECIAL PERFORMANCE - 30th JANUARY
Holding, Still tests what happens when the body attempts to inhabit something that exceeds it. Through accumulation and strain, the work attends to the uneven weight of inheritance, what is carried without instruction, without fit and without closure.
Baluchi dresses are layered until the body becomes unstable. The garments slip, bunch and resist arrangement, refusing to settle into coherence. The performance stays with this instability, holding the body between presence and absence, proximity and distance, between holding on and letting go. Presented alongside the film and photographic works, the performance operates as part of an interconnected field in which weight is encountered across different registers: material, bodily and temporal.
Timings: opens at 6 PM, performance 6:30 PM
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BIOGRAPHIES
Sohaila Baluch is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working across durational performance, lens-based media, installation and text. Her doctoral research, 'Inhabiting Discomfort: On Being a British South Asian Woman', undertaken at the Royal College of Art, has been supported by an LAHP/AHRC scholarship. Her practice centres embodiment and materiality, positioning the brown female body as subject, method, archive and threshold. Drawing on matrilineal histories and the afterlives of British colonialism, her work addresses displacement, inheritance, erasure and the politics of belonging and representation. Her works and performances have been presented across London at Burlington House, Beaconsfield Gallery, Bishopsgate Institute, Hypha Studios, Itsalocalcollective and the Jarman Lab/Birkbeck Cinema. In 2025, she was the inaugural Magna Carta Maker-in-Residence at the Society of Antiquaries, London and is a member of the LUX Moving Image Critical Forum Collective 2025 - 2026. Her writing appears in CARE(LESS): A Supplement to On Care (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2021); Home: Provoking Conversations on Place and Belonging (Routledge, 2026) and Re-Evaluation in Feminism and Contemporary Art, ed. Katy Deepwell, Vernon Press, 2026. sohailabaluch.com
Writer, lecturer, and critic, Akin Oladimeji's fiction, essays, and criticism have found homes in publications such as e-flux, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Third Text Online, Aperture, Wasafiri, and beyond. Most recently, he was honoured with an Arts and Humanities Research Council studentship, propelling him into his PhD project starting September 2024 through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) at UCL. His forthcoming dissertation charts a constellation of contemporary African performance artists, delving into powerful narratives of history, trauma, and social transformation.