Nicole Coson

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Thresholds of Becoming

esea contemporary, Manchester

2026

esea contemporary marks its 40th anniversary in 2026 with Thresholds of Becoming, a new group exhibition bringing together six artists whose practices probe the architectures of transition and the fragile ecologies of the in-between: Nicole Coson, Xin Liu, Charmaine Poh, Minoru Nomata, Yang Yongliang, and Yin Aiwen.

Curated by esea contemporary Director, Xiaowen Zhu, the exhibition understands transformation as a restless process of reconfiguration — of meaning, of material, of the bonds that hold us together and the fractures that pull us apart. The exhibition positions mutation and instability not as failures, but as generative states through which new worlds might be glimpsed.

Drawing on Vietnamese theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha’s writing on passage and in-betweenness — that to move across is also to move within — the exhibition dwells in these thresholds — tidal, digital, speculative, terrestrial — tracing the fragile grounds on which we live. Here, transition becomes a lived condition: a turbulence in which forms reorganise, histories unsettle, and futures flicker into view.

Through Some place, within here (2024), Nicole Cosonextends her enquiry into surface, memory and material translation. A suspended constellation of aluminium-cast oyster shells linked by metal rings, drawing from aquafarming structures in the Philippines — where oysters grow on latticed grids beneath shifting currents — registers subtle ecological and temporal drift. This architecture of cultivation becomes a threshold in which vernacular forms shift registers, revealing how materials gather histories as they move, settle and transform across contexts.