The newly opened Gallery Les Bois makes a striking entrance into London’s art scene with Offline, a group exhibition that wrestles with urgent global themes: digital saturation, environmental breakdown, and human displacement.
Running from 9 to 22 July 2025 at 230 Portobello Road, Notting Hill, the exhibition is open daily from 10 am to 6 pm, offering a timely and deeply affecting experience at the intersection of art, environmental consciousness, and storytelling.
At the heart of Offline is the evocative work of Volcan, the Dutch/Colombian artist duo Rex and Edna Volcan. Known for their genre-blurring approach that combines cultural anthropology, creative direction, and fashion, the Volcans explore human perception through the lens of global narratives.
The exhibition takes its name from their Offline series, first shown as the Refugee Remembrance Wall at the 59th Venice Biennale. It continues the duo’s exploration of memory, dislocation, and identity in the modern world.
In haunting portraiture marked by the incomplete “charging circle”, Volcan’s Offline confronts viewers with the emotional weight of stalled lives. These works evoke the liminal state of millions caught between worlds: refugees, the stateless, and those rendered invisible by systems too fast to care. It’s a powerful metaphor for technological alienation and social abandonment.
Complementing these portraits is Volcan’s sculptural suite Roadworks, which transforms salvaged urban materials – broken signage, tarmac fragments, construction barriers – into dystopian relics of infrastructural and societal decay. The installation serves as a warning and a lament: a reminder of what gets left behind when cities evolve without care for the human and ecological systems they uproot.
Alongside Volcan, the exhibition also features the works of Steve Foster, Oliver Akdeniz, Miranda Carter, Julian Emsley and Jasmine Pradissitto. These artists’ practices not only help to enrich Offline’s aesthetic appeal further, but they also share a common thread of reclaiming material and meaning. They also extend the exhibition’s ecological and social concerns into new material dimensions. Akdeniz’ ceramic sculptures explore issues such as pollution and drought, reflected in his ‘Cracked Earth’ and ‘Pollen Path’ series. Carter’s paintings of ethereal landscapes reflect a love of nature and reminds us of its vulnerability. Pradissitto, working with air-purifying ceramic NOXORB, offers sculptures that breathe with purpose, acting as both symbol and solution. Emsley’s fully sustainable and evocative sculptures use wood from London trees which have been necessarily felled due to wind or disease. Foster’s floral work reflects the fragility and impermanence of natural beauty, highlighting our collective responsibility to it.
Offline is not only about stepping back from the speed of modern life; it’s about confronting what’s at risk when we fail to look closely, to slow down, or to care. Together, these artists construct a visual language rooted in the recovery of memory as well as matter.
Volcan’s presence at Offline is especially significant. Following their appearance at the 59th Venice Biennale, the duo returned to the prestigious 60th edition in 2024, cementing their role as leading voices in socially engaged, narrative-driven contemporary art. Their Notting Hill studio has since become a vital hub for cross-disciplinary collaboration, with Edna’s background in fashion and Rex’s conceptual vision driving an ever-evolving dialogue between aesthetics and ethics.
With Offline, Gallery Les Bois announces itself not only as a new space for art but as a platform for urgent conversation. In an age of disconnection, this exhibition dares to reconnect us with the planet, with each other, and with the stories we cannot afford to forget.
Exhibition Details:
The exhibition is currently being shown at Portobello Road, Notting Hill, London from 9–22 July 2025 daily from 10am–6pm. Follow this link for further information.
