Ashe: This too shall pass

This too shall pass was a performance installation that examined the erosion of human connection in contemporary society. Through performance, sculpture, photography, and video, the work interrogated how personal information—archived, classified, and stored—reduces individuals to records, rendering them data points rather than beings with unique lived experiences.

The installation constructed a space of tension between presence and absence, intimacy and erasure. At the heart of the work was a meditation on care, loss, and the struggle to retain humanity in a system that prioritises documentation over lived experience. The performance element resisted these mechanisms, offering a fleeting moment of connection—one that cannot be wholly archived or quantified. This too shall pass asked; what remains when intimacy is stripped away, when the archive becomes the only proof of existence? How do we reclaim identity beyond the structures that seek to define and contain us?

A performance featuring a life model took place within the exhibition across three dates.

• Friday 4 April 2025, 5.30pm (as part of the opening event)
• Wednesday 30 April 2025, 12.00pm – 12.30pm
• Saturday 10 May 2025, 2.00pm – 2.30pm

Please note that the installation features representations of nudity.

About the artist
Ashe’s practice fuses live performance with the readymade incorporating photography, sculpture, text and video. This results in poetic and evocative (sometimes provocative) installations that explore the politics of identity, belonging, and marginalisation. This transdisciplinary approach to artmaking draws from Ashe’s personal history and experience, questioning our (broken) social systems and what it means to seek a safe place to (be)long in contemporary society.