Like Music in the Blood — Eight Artists at Thaddeus Ropac
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Location: Thaddeus Ropac, London
Date: September 3–30, 2026
Project: Group exhibition featuring Suleman Aqeel Khilji, Galli, Benjamin Orlow, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Kira Freije, Tanoa Sasraku, Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Emil Sands
Why it Matters: Eight artists, eight materials around one question: what's left of a body once it's made into something else
The show takes its title from a simile, a reminder that no image or object fully stands in for a lived experience, only approximates it. Eight artists work through that gap using different materials: paint, cast metal, clay, leather, newspaper, plaster.
Quetta runs through Suleman Aqeel Khilji's paintings, old family photographs, Urdu calligraphy, stills from Pakistani television, filtered through a narrow palette of lemon yellow, Lapis Lazuli, Lahore Indigo and Pozzuoli Earth.
Since the West Berlin scene of the late 1970s, Galli has painted the body as something collective rather than individual, stark silhouettes whose limbs turn into claws or hooves without warning.
Nearby, Benjamin Orlow works in clay, plaster, bronze and wood, building forms strung up on scaffolds and slings that read as both heroic and half-collapsed. His installation Ritual City, built on-site from raw clay, is currently on view in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings work in fresco, a medium that leaves visible scars where each wet section of plaster meets the next. Their compositions pull from queer culture, Renaissance painting and protest photography, so the uniform in a scene rarely matches the person standing in it.
Three life-size figures make up Kira Freije's trudging, the sodden prelude, stainless-steel armatures with hands and faces cast in aluminum from her own family and friends. Her largest UK exhibition to date, Unspeak the Chorus, traveled from the Hepworth Wakefield to Modern Art Oxford this past year and earned her a place on the 2026 Turner Prize shortlist.
Tanoa Sasraku tans sheets of newspaper under sunbed light, then cuts and clamps them into torso shapes. The work carries two inherited histories at once, her mother's sunbeds in Plymouth and her father's pattern cutting as a fashion designer in Ghana. Her solo show at the ICA London last year put her on the same Turner Prize shortlist as Freije.
Leather is the material for Tiona Nekkia McClodden, cut with an épée and worked with shoe polish, or bound tightly in jute rope using knot patterns from the Japanese practice of kinbaku-bi. Her work also appears in Koyo Kouoh's In Minor Keys at this year's Venice Biennale.
Emil Sands closes the show with paintings of partly clothed figures, often the same body appearing more than once across a single canvas, less a narrative than a set of angles on the same person.
Like Music in the Blood runs through September 30 at Thaddeus Ropac, London.
More info: ropac.net
