The Power Plant

Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything is an exhibition by Vancouver-born, UK-based artist Zadie Xa, made together with her long-term collaborator, artist Benito Mayor Vallejo.

The exhibition includes new paintings alongside works from the 2024 exhibition Rough Hands Weave a Knife and Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything, an immersive installation by Xa and Mayor Vallejo presented at the Sharjah Biennial 16 in 2025, which won the artist a nomination for the prestigious Turner Prize that same year. These works continue Xa’s ongoing exploration of diasporic identity, hybrid spaces, Korean mythology and folklore, the power of storytelling, and the deep interconnections that bind us to non-human worlds.

Expansive and multilayered, the exhibition combines a range of media—including a sound installation, a hand-painted mural of saturated twilight colours, and delicate bronze sculptures of hybrid figures dancing between human and animal worlds, co-authored by both artists—with intimate and large-scale paintings by Xa that often incorporate textile panels evoking traditional Korean patchwork quilting.

Across this varied landscape, several narratives recur. One is a fascination with matriarchal subjects. Many of Xa’s paintings show female figures in spiritual or mystical scenes. They conjure visions of forested or undersea landscapes, the practice of Salpuri (a traditional Korean spirit-cleansing dance rooted in shamanic rituals), or commune with fantastical creatures and messengers from other worlds. A frequent motif in Xa’s work that also has a presence here is the whale, and in particular a certain species of orca that passes ancestral knowledge down to younger generations through its matrilineal elders.

Animals are just as likely to take centre stage in Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything as their human counterparts. These include treasured domestic pets, but also creatures subsisting on the margins of human society, such as the seagull and the fox. A cultural shapeshifter, foxes hold deep significance in Korean culture but are also ubiquitous in the urban landscapes of Xa’s London home. As in a parable or fairy tale, these creatures can be understood as instructional figures or interlocutors. They take us between worlds and offer us much-needed guidance at this critical moment of ecological frailty.

The ocean is another guiding theme within the exhibition. Connecting South Korea, Canada’s West Coast and the United Kingdom, the deep sea is evoked here through depictions of marine creatures, through the glint of mother of pearl, and through recurring references to seashells. The seashell motif is echoed in a number of works co-authored by Xa and Mayor Vallejo, including a spoken narrative heard through four suspended shells, and a mobile made of over six hundred brass bells traditionally used in Korean shamanic rituals, hung from the gallery’s ceiling in the spiral shape of a conch.