“How many leaves does basil have?” opens with a seemingly simple question that resists any definitive answer. Here, counting operates as a metaphor for processes of transfer: stories, images, and memories that accumulate, migrate, and transform without ever becoming fully catalogued.
The exhibition brings together the practices of Billie J. Kanter and Faryda Moumouh, united by a shared engagement with fragmentation, rearrangement, and the material conditions through which memory is carried and transmitted. While their points of departure differ, both artists approach source material not as fixed authority but as mutable matter; subject to dismantling, delay, restructuring, and rearticulation.
Billie J. Kanter examines the mechanisms through which narratives are displaced and recoded into visual form. History is registered not illustratively but structurally, embedded in colour, texture, and formal organisation. Within the studio, fragments accumulate and recur in shifting constellations, producing surfaces compressed from indirect traces of reproduction and recollection. Their origins remain intentionally indeterminate; what emerges instead is a latent grammar that does not explain but retains, allowing origin to persist only as resonance.
Faryda Moumouh takes the photographic image as the point of entry for processes of manipulation, addition, and material intervention. Through the conjunction of digital editing and manual procedures; incorporating acrylic, ink, tracing paper, and mica, she constructs layered image fields in which observed reality, remembered space, and subjective projection converge. Landscapes, portraits, and urban environments appear as psychological topographies where identity, geography, and lived experience remain in flux. Her works function as archaeological strata in which traces are preserved yet never fully resolve into a single, stable source.
The basil plant operates both as narrative reference and methodological proposition: a surface constituted through the accumulation of innumerable small units. Just as its leaves continue to proliferate beyond any final count, migrating narratives, photographic residues, and visual reconstructions resist closure or definitive classification. What the exhibition foregrounds, therefore, is not the preservation of the past but the continuous reorganisation of images, stories, and materials as an active, unfolding condition.