Towards is pleased to present What Remains, a two-person exhibition of work by Alixe Turner and Maria Trabulo.
Working across painting, sculpture, film, and installation, the two artists explore themes of memory, forgotten histories, and the ways in which we render the invisible, visible.
Alixe Turner’s practice examines cultural memory and personal indexes of her past experiences. Her work interrogates the ideological frameworks that render people and landscapes invisible.
Her large scale paintings are reminiscent of topography, occupying spaces both real and imagined. Working intuitively, she slowly builds up the surface of her canvases, creating densely layered, textural works imbued with their own ongoing sense of transformation.
Maria Trabulo’s multi-disciplinary practice explores the role that images and artifacts play in shaping both our personal and collective memory. Her work examines the ways in which artifacts accrue meaning, and the ways in which that meaning is in a continuous state of flux.
Trabulo’s works in What Remains were initiated as part of a residency at the Bode Museum in Berlin in 2024. Working alongside museum conservators and staff, Trabulo documented and catalogued various artifacts that were either damaged or disappeared as a result of the second world war.
The last known images of many of these artworks and artifacts date to the 1920’s, when the museum undertook a cataloguing of the collection. Statues, coins, and artworks spanning from the 7th century through the Renaissance were photographed for records to be made.
Today, the photo negatives for the over 700 works from the Bode Museum that were either destroyed or disappeared during the second world war are all that remains. Despite having survived the many horrors of the 20th century, the photo negatives have not been able to defy the passage of time. 100 years after their creation, many are fractured, discoloured and slowly disintegrating. With their disappearance, so goes any remaining trace that these artifacts ever existed.