Restrained Despair (in D Minor)
8 October–6 December 2025

This mixed-media exhibition, which opened ahead of Frieze Week in London, brought together four artists – Daniel Castro Garcia, Cyrus Mahboubian, Marie Obegi, and Naira Mushtaq – whose works explore family stories, personal memory, collective history and the dissonance of political upheaval.

The video featured on this page was recorded during our Frieze party on 10 October.

Exhibition text by Nayla Chidiac:

“Do I dare disturb the universe?“ (T.S. Eliot)

This collective exhibition begins with a question; a quiet fracture in the surface of the everyday. The works gathered here hover in the space between presence and withdrawal, where emotion is quiet but insistent, and form becomes a delicate negotiation with silence. The gestures are subtle, the materials carefully chosen, the tones subdued. Yet nothing is neutral. These works do not soothe. They stay. They linger. They displace.

In a minor key, music leans toward introspection. Likewise, these artworks suggest interior states, fragile, persistent, and often unnamed. There is no collapse here. Only the trace of something endured.

In a time when everything must be immediate, visible, and loud, these works offer another rhythm: slower, deeper, mysterious. They ask us to stay a little longer. To look again. To feel, to think.

Art here becomes a way to hold what cannot be fixed. To name what has no words. To disturb the universe, gently.