Condo London 2025

Nova Contemporary is pleased to present Pillows, a duo exhibition of works by Pam Virada and James Prapaithong. Framing the gallery as a domestic refuge, the exhibition explores how interiority, both spatial and psychological, harbors secrets, comforts, and memory.

The exhibition’s title draws from the concept of "pillow words" in Japanese waka poetry, literary devices used to shape musicality and atmosphere. This tactic is also where Yasujirō Ozu, whom both artists have referenced, roots his cinematic "pillow shots”, in which he employs stillness to amplify the frequencies of latent feelings and unexpressed desires. Depicting scenes from tender, focused observation, Virada and Prapaithong’s works articulate the poetic resonances within the marginal and the elliptical, demonstrating how emptiness can be reclaimed as a mode of authorial agency.

In his lush beds of colour and texture, Prapaithong unveils intricate compositions of light and shadow. Each of his visual grounds are carefully drawn out, with a precision akin to a camera’s indiscriminate grasp. He fixes the fleeting while retaining a sense of equivocation; the paintings are lucid yet reticent as if emerging from a powdery haze.

Crafted from found trays, Virada’s sconce sculptures merge the utilitarian and the lyrical. She combines multiple registers of visual information, overlaying images of abstracted windows with prints of privacy films. Her deployment of directional ambiguity sutures the exterior and the interior, leaving one to wonder whether they are looking in or out.

In both artists' practices, the gesture of superimposition is not only visual but also mental, reflecting the way memory and experience layer upon one another as a palimpsest. The transparency of the gallery’s glass windows also establishes a self-referential experience of voyeurism for the viewer, offering vectors of both exposure and concealment. Pillows is a hushed meditation on how we appraise the spaces, objects, and moments that are dear to us, and how they take on a second life by persisting within us.