Between Beginnings & Endings

Participation Notice

This exhibition includes an optional interactive, algorithmic matchmaking component.
Art-goers are invited to complete a questionnaire in order to participate in the work.

The questionnaire and resulting classifications are grounded in behavioral research. Some participants may find the results confronting or unexpectedly personal.

Participation is voluntary. You are welcome to attend the exhibition without engaging in the matchmaking component.

RSVP ONLY

RSVP + DATING

CURATOR - Neelanchal Gupta

ARTIST - Pin-Yu Wu

ARTIST - Aima Fan

ARTIST - Kate Youme

BETWEEN BEGINNINGS & ENDINGS

Thursday, 5 March | 6–8pm | Hanger Gallery, RCA Battersea

In a time where romance feels algorithmic and intimacy arrives with terms and conditions, Between Beginnings & Endings considers what it means to date, desire, detach… and try again.

Neelanchal Gupta curates a one-evening exhibition. Bringing together Kate Youme, Pin-Yu Wu, and Aima Fan, whose works examine how contemporary relationships are structured, rehearsed, optimized, and mourned. Across interactive systems, wearable apparatus, and poetic interventions, the exhibition explores how love is increasingly mediated by technology, ritual, memory, and repetition.

At the centre of the evening is Kate Youme’s participatory work, Really Real Arbitrary Dating (2026). An interactive questionnaire grounded in relationship science and behavioral correlations. The work sorts visitors into personality types and compatibility groupings. It compresses what can take years to discover into a two-hour social experiment. Wall diagrams reveal alignments, mismatches, and thresholds of “date-ability,” asking whether compatibility guarantees sustainability, or whether romance has already become a predictive pattern. It is not stereotypical speed dating. It is a performance of how we date now: expedited, classified, and quietly stripped of narrative control.

In dialogue with this algorithmic framing of intimacy, Pin-Yu Wu presents A Practice of Intimate Relationships – Fingers Interlaced Fixture (2024), a wearable sculpture and participatory performance. Referencing the simple gesture of interlaced fingers, Wu reimagines touch as something that now requires rehearsal. The fixture encourages participants to practice physical closeness, simulating the bodily conditions that generate attachment and safety. In a culture where intimacy is increasingly mediated by screens and systems, Wu proposes that even tenderness may need retraining.

Through text-based works and printed matter, Aima Fan approaches heartbreak from a mythic and political register. Time Travel for The Recently Divorced™ (2025), a risograph series, satirically questions our desire to return to earlier versions of love and history. Alongside this, Fan presents [Such Cruelty] (2026) and The Confession (2026), zines that navigate break-up, coercion, longing, and emotional extremity. Fan’s work resists closure, exposing how endings echo beyond the personal into cultural nostalgia and ideological regression. Her work asks, if we could return to the beginning.. would we? And what would that undo?

For two hours, the gallery becomes a rehearsal space: a site where compatibility is calculated, touch is retrained, and heartbreak is archived. Between Beginnings & Endings does not promise resolution. Instead, it stages the fragile systems through which we attempt connection, and the patterns we repeat in pursuit of it.

RSVP to confirm your place.