Group show | Oriane Emery, Noah El Hachem, Roland Knowlden Junior
Exhibition
03.09.2026 — 26.09.2026
DSG WELCOMES Xxijra Hii
Opening
03.09.2026 — 18h
DS Galerie inaugurates DSG WELCOMES, a new international invitation programme that opens its exhibition programme to invited galleries. Conceived as a space for dialogue, experimentation and the circulation of ideas, the initiative establishes the gallery as a site of action and reflection where artists, gallerists, curators, critics, researchers, collectors and institutions come together to generate new narratives and foster unexpected connections between contemporary art scenes.
This inaugural edition welcomes the London-based gallery Xxijra Hii, extending a collaboration initiated at Art-O-Rama in Marseille in August 2026. On this occasion, the gallery presents “Vapour Oblique”, a group exhibition bringing together works by Oriane Emery, Noah El Hachem, and Roland Knowlden Jr.
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“Bringing together painting and sculpture, the exhibition considers the nebulous as a form of protection, rebellion and transformation. Across the three practices, identity is not presented as a fixed position or a resolved narrative, but as something assembled through fragments: a stain, an eye, a curve, a domestic gesture, a spatial clue, a withheld inheritance. What travels through these works is never fully exposed. It is carried, re-routed, partially translated and sometimes deliberately kept out of reach.
The exhibition aims to understand movement and transmutation as a pressure placed on memory and transmission. How much of a history can be shared before it becomes simplified, consumed or misunderstood? What must remain guarded in order to survive circulation? Here, the vague or uncanny becomes a method of care, but also a refusal: a way of resisting the demand to make oneself, one’s lineage or one’s images entirely legible.
In Noah El Hachem’s paintings, portraiture becomes unstable terrain. Carefully rendered figures appear within undetermined spaces, surrounded by recurring leaves, eyes, sweeping curves and angular structures. Drawing on the organic geometries and ornamental defiance of early 20th c. architecture, El Hachem allows the portrait to move beyond likeness, opening instead onto an intuitive pictorial language where the real and imagined remain in negotiation. Growing up in the Ruhr region, El Hachem was surrounded by pragmatic post-war architecture. This decorative style of architecture was comparatively rare and often appeared in former industrial areas; to the artist encountering them felt like discovering something hidden. In practice, he does not consciously imitate these forms; they emerge intuitively while drawing, much like handwriting itself; forming the basis of his visual language. While painting, decisions are made almost instantaneously. In that sense, handwriting is more important than what is written - the marks themselves carry the meaning, while the subject simply becomes the vehicle through which that language is expressed. This results in work that resists stable recognition, turning image-making into a quiet act of transformation.
Roland Knowlden Jr.’s practice explores absence, uncertainty and disorder in tension with systems of knowledge and control. Working across multiple mediums, he uses collage, assemblage and fragmentation to construct speculative geographies in which boundaries, origins and meanings remain contingent. His works operate less as a ‘map’ than as unsettled methods of orientation, bringing found imagery, material rupture and symbolic structure into unstable relation. Across masks, paintings and sculpture, Knowlden returns to the idea of the entryway: not as a stable passage from one place to another, but as a threshold where opacity, disorientation and transformation become active. Absence is not emptiness, but a site of potential; a negative space through which histories may return as traces, clues, rhythms or fragments. His work proposes wayfinding as a rebellious act: a refusal of fixed routes, fixed origins and fixed systems of interpretation.
Oriane Emery’s work approaches métissage as an intimate and political act of reconstruction. Drawing on Swiss-Algerian heritage, archival research, fiction and embodied experience; her practice examines unstable relationships between personal memory, colonial histories, representation and belonging. Emery treats absence, translation and inherited images as active materials: things to be handled, interrupted, re-stitched and made newly legible on her own terms. In recent works, she draws together domestic objects, protective embroidery, inherited symbols and gestures of care in an attempt to slow the circulation of violent images and recover what has been withheld. Algerian eyelet stitches, associated with protection against the evil eye, partially cover and complicate the image, introducing a slower temporality against the speed and repetition of digital circulation. Elsewhere, a stained handkerchief, white tile and Agadez cross become traces of labour, attachment and uncertain orientation. For those made to feel illegitimate by family, nation or history, identity becomes less a given than a quest: a process of gathering strength from rupture, and of authorising oneself through what was once denied.
Together, the three artists propose the nebulous not as absence, but as a living condition. Their works do not resolve identity, reflection, memory or belonging into fixed form. Instead, they create a sensitive territory in which the intimate meets the political, where protection becomes a means of transmission: a way to let something travel without letting it be consumed.”
Text by | Xxijra Hii
Swiss visual artist Oriane Emery (b. 1999) lives and works in Lausanne. Through installation, moving image, performance, writing and works on paper, she explores the ways intimate narratives intersect with colonial histories, displacement, memory and the transmission of images.
Her practice combines archival research, fiction and embodied experience to examine unstable relationships between personal and collective memory, representation and belonging. Drawing on her Swiss and Algerian background, she develops spatial and narrative forms in which absence, translation and inherited images become active materials.
Her work has notably been presented at Arsenic – Contemporary Performing Arts Centre in Lausanne, CACY – Centre d’Art Contemporain Yverdon, Fabienne Levy Gallery in Lausanne, one gee in fog in Geneva.
She took part in the SOMA Summer Critical Residency in Mexico City in 2023 and was awarded the EXECAL Prize for her Master’s thesis at ECAL in 2024. In 2026, she was selected for a Pro Helvetia residency in the Arab region.
Between 2023 and 2026, she co-directed CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute in Lausanne, where she developed exhibitions, performances, screenings and publications with Swiss and international artists. This curatorial experience extends her artistic research into forms of relation, accessibility and collective production.
Noah El Hachem (b. 1999, Germany) is a Düsseldorf-based artist. He completed a BA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2021 and has also studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
El Hachem’s paintings combine carefully rendered portraiture with an intuitive language of ornament, repetition and abstraction. Figures appear suspended within compositions of recurring eyes, leaves, sweeping curves and angular structures, producing images that feel at once psychologically charged and composed. Although rich in symbolism, his works resist fixed narratives, instead creating contemplative spaces in which the body, its surroundings and the painted surface remain in continual negotiation.
Early twentieth-century architecture is central to El Hachem’s visual language, particularly the sculptural sensibility, asymmetry and organic geometries associated with Art Nouveau. Influenced by architects including Hector Guimard and Peter Behrens, he draws on the ways architecture borrows from biological forms, mathematical rhythms and calligraphic gestures. The characteristic Art Nouveau “whiplash” curve has become a form of visual handwriting within his work, emerging instinctively through the act of drawing.
For El Hachem, the meaning of a painting resides as much in the movement and character of its marks as in its subject. Portraiture becomes a vehicle through which an intuitive and continually evolving pictorial language can unfold.
Roland Knowlden Jr. (b. 1995 Bayonne, New Jersey, USA) is a Liberian-American artist based in London. Working across painting, drawing and sculpture, his practice explores the material poetics of absence, uncertainty and disorder and the tensions these forces produce within systems of knowledge and power. Through processes of collage and assemblage, Knowlden brings found imagery, architectural structures and disparate materials into unstable relation. Erasure, fragmentation and displacement become methods for disrupting familiar objects and systems of representation, allowing alternative spatial and historical narratives to emerge. His works frequently operate as forms of critical cartography: speculative geographies in which boundaries, origins and meanings remain contingent. He approaches both image and object as constructed environments, testing how materials can converge, diverge and continually transform.
Knowlden is a 2026 MFA Fine Art candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London and received a Bachelor of Architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2020. Recent solo exhibitions include Negations, House Work Presents, London (2025); Black Tributary, Boundary Gallery, Chicago (2024); and Horizon, Expanse: A Source and A Mirage, Cleaner Gallery, Chicago (2023). His work has also been exhibited at Public Gallery, DePaul Art Museum, Elmhurst Art Museum, South Side Community Arts Center and Mana Contemporary.
“SHY-RAH-HI ”
Founded in 2020 in Deptford, South London, Xxijra Hii emerged at a moment that called for new ways of exhibiting and experiencing art. Initially conceived as an experimental project, the gallery developed through digital formats and remote encounters, which enabled it to refine its programme and rethink the relationships it cultivates with its communities, both online and in physical space. Since 2023, Xxijra Hii has operated as an independent commercial gallery.
The gallery champions artists whose practices exist at the margins of convention, exploring unusual mediums, new creative processes, collaborative forms and alternative approaches to theory and allegory. Xxijra Hii is particularly interested in works that challenge our certainties and encourage us to question what we know—or think we know.
Committed to a thoughtful and sensitive approach, the gallery supports artistic practices capable of addressing complex subjects with humility and nuance. This balance between critical inquiry and human experience lies at the heart of its identity.
Today, Xxijra Hii works with a growing number of artists and is especially committed to supporting emerging practitioners, as well as those returning to their practice after periods of transition and development. Its programme is rooted in knowledge-sharing, collective research and the collaborative production of new ideas.
The gallery currently represents Yuli Serfaty, Glen Pudvine, Chris Thompson, Hannah Morgan and David Micheaud, whose practices are united by a shared interest in experimentation and emerging forms of contemporary artistic production. More info