Public Gallery is pleased to present MINE, YOURS, OURS, an exhibition of film, sculpture, and multi-media installation by artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Adam Farah-Saad, and Xin Liu. Spanning three floors of the gallery, the exhibition considers practices of intimacy and remembrance, asking how the personal and collective overlap in a shared pursuit of self-governance and survival.
Positioned at the frontier of technological and cultural change, Xin Liu’s practice examines the futility of preservation and the exhausts of progress and scientific pursuit, foregrounding the limitations that shape our contemporary condition. Her work reclaims narratives shaped by technological transformations in recent decades, from space exploration and immigration to biotechnology and motherhood. On the basement level, Liu’s mixed media installation Book of Mine (2019) projects the artist’s DNA sequence in base pairs across the back wall. A dot matrix printer produces endless pages of Liu’s genomic code, sampled and sequenced in 2018, on continuous-feed paper, slowly filling the gallery with her personal data over the exhibition’s duration. Yet printing it in its entirety is an impossible task: nearly 900 pages contain only the bases of her X chromosome, demonstrating the very limits of self-authorship and comprehension.
In the upstairs gallery, Adam Farah-Saad presents a floor-based grid of prints beneath liquid-filled perspex trays, collectively imaging two men in bondage. On two opposing walls, a pair of box frames or ‘scent chambers’ house sliding panels of reeded perspex and C-type prints mounted on aluminum, through which complementary olfactory works formulated by the artist diffuse into the space. While Farah-Saad has explored olfactory dimensions within his practice for nearly a decade, particularly in relation to psychogeography, queer sociality and gentrification, this new body of work marks a shift into self-formulated fragrance. He presents two conceptual scents: NW1 (2025), carrying notes of fresh cut grass, petitgrain, tonka and birch tar; and W9 (2025), with notes of vetiver, guaiacwood, cypriol, herbal smoke, orris, musk and warm skin. Together, they recall a memory of a summer evening in 2020 which began
in Primrose Hill and ended at a romantic partner’s flat in Maida Vale, forming a vessel for his memory to unfold, a portal into the atmosphere of a relationship and the traces it leaves behind.
On the ground floor, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s 40-minute film DIGGING FOR BLACK TRANS LIFE (2019) grapples with notions of archival erasure, reclaiming buried Black Trans stories and imagining digital spaces to hold their collective history. Autotuned voices serenade the viewer, seated among the artist’s guardian sculptures, as text flashes across the screen: “ITS GOT TO BE BURIED SOMEWHERE AROUND HERE”. The film incorporates talk-show tropes that commodify trans trauma, introducing characters such as the Dehumanizer, Big Bish, and The Singer With Centuries. Carrying the viewer into a narrative world aligned with the artist’s participatory video game works, the film serves as a foundational part of Brathwaite-Shirley’s larger project of creating digital archives that center and safeguard Black Trans ancestors.
In its entirety, MINE, YOURS, OURS explores spaces of belonging and archives of intimacy. Liu’s genomic project points to the impossibility of fully knowing or authoring the self, even in an age of boundless data. Farah-Saad’s sculptural and olfactory installation transforms memory into a material and atmospheric presence. Brathwaite-Shirley’s film excavates buried narratives of Black Trans lives, confronting the violence of erasure and weaponization of trauma while simultaneously constructing an archive rooted in care and resistance. What unites these works is a shared reconsideration of intimacy and remembrance – asking how knowledge is inscribed in bodies and technologies, how memory lingers in materials and atmospheres, and how communities carry and protect their histories – insisting that the personal becomes part of the collective, and stories – mine, yours, ours – might be continuously rewritten, unfolding through gestures of endurance and survival.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, London, UK) lives and works between Berlin, Germany and London, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include Uncensored, Nome Gallery, Berlin (2025); THE SOUL STATION, LAS Foundation, Halle am Berghain, Berlin (2024); No Comment, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2024); THE REBIRTHING ROOM, Studio Voltaire, London (2024); NO SPACE FOR REDEMPTION, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024); Get Home Safe, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2023); BEFORE THERE WERE NONE, Villa Arson, Nice (2023); and PIRATING BLACKNESS, HAU, Berlin (2023). She/they have participated group exhibitions at Public Gallery, London; Art Museum at the University of Toronto; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York; Das Centre Pompidou-Metz; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Les Urbaines, Lausanne; and Barbican, London. Her/their work has been the subject of screenings and performances at institutions including Tate Modern, London; MoMA, New York; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Serpentine, London; Spike Island, Bristol; and South London Gallery. Permanent collections include the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. Forthcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Serpentine North, London, opening September 29, 2025.
Xin Liu (b. 1991, Xinjiang, China) lives and works in London, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include The Permanent and the Insatiable, Management Gallery, New York (2025); At End of Everything, Artpace, San Antonio (2023); Seedlings and Offsprings, Pioneer Works, New York (2023); Self Devourer, Make Room, Los Angeles (2022); and The Ground is Falling, Aranya Art Center, Qinhuangdao (2021). She has participated in group exhibitions at Moody Center for the Arts, Houston; Public Gallery, London; Asia Society Texas Center, Houston; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Benton Museum of Art, Claremont; Jan Kaps, Cologne; Science Gallery London; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; MoMA PS1, New York; MAXXI, Rome; Ars Electronica, Linz; Onassis Foundation, Vaduz and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Recent residencies include the Delfina Foundation, London (2025); Somerset House, London (2024–present); Rice University, Houston (2024); and Artpace, San Antonio (2023). She is the recipient of The Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award (2025), and inaugural K11 Artist Prize (2024). Permanent collections include the Kadist Foundation, Paris, France and San Francisco, USA; the Onassis Foundation, Athens, Greece; X Museum, Beijing, China; Zhi Art Museum, Chengdu, China; He Art Museum, Shunde, China; and Tanoto Art Foundation, Singapore. Forthcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. The gallery will present a solo booth of Xin Liu at Frieze London 2025.
Adam Farah-Saad (b. 1991, London, UK) lives and works in London, UK. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include the face of you, my substitute for love, Metroland Cultures, London (2024); B-SIDES (THE RE-UP / PSYCHOCRUISING FAITHFUL MIX), Public Gallery, London (2023); WHAT I’VE LEARNED FROM YOU AND MYSELF (PEAK MOMENTATIONS / INSIDE MY VELVET ROPE MIX), Camden Arts Centre, London (2021); and , South London Gallery (2018). He has participated in group exhibitions at The Perimeter, London; CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain, Bordeaux; Public Gallery, London; Arcadia Missa, London; Bold Tendencies, London; Paradise Row Projects, London; Galerie Sultana, Paris; DOC, Paris; Auto Italia, London; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; and Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He is the recipient of the Focus Stand Prize at Frieze London (2023), The Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award (2023), the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award (2021), and the South London Gallery Postgraduate Residency Award (2017). Permanent collections include Tate, London UK and the Arts Council Collection, UK. Forthcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Public Gallery, London in 2026.
