The Catalyst
a space to ( = )
11th July- 20th September, 2026
Loudspeakers Summit Assemblage:
Speakers of the World, United!
Lenny and the Primitivist
Opening: 11th July 2026, 6PM
Opening Concert Streaming from Peace Habitat, 7:30PM
Have you ever found yourself trapped in a fever dream, unable to escape the same Kafkaesque loop, endlessly repeating the same gestures in the hope of a different outcome?
Lenny and the Primitivist’s eclectic, interconnected practice encompasses diverse forms, intimate and radically apolitical, hinging on ethnographic matrices and contemplating participatory and extra-media modes of action —from music to painting to sculpture, as well as video, installations, and performances. These expressions are informed by questions around authority, speech, and class, hinting at a will to escape from the structures of the establishment. Drawing inspirations from popular culture, socio-political literature, and current state of the world, their works explore the unstable nature of humankind, its intrinsic wildness, and the sensuality and violence embedded in the most banal, seemingly unspectacular situations.
Here, in Lenny and the Primitivist-verse, conceptualism sometimes blushes into rosy romanticism in their attempt to treat the unsystematic systematically, slipping in and out of reason while trying to link all the destinies by a likeness, by co-occurrence, sympathy. Still, their work is only metaphysical in the spirit-matter sense of vesting space with idealisations. Loudspeakers transforms but also transports, outside of ourselves, more or less literally—like an easily sunken drunken boat within which the dissolution of identity was more important than its framing, that the works are capable of engendering a push-pull dynamic between the individual figure and the landscape of the exhibition. It is combining transcendental radiance with a sense of introspection, the interplay of part and whole and the link between the immediate moment and cosmic time.
But Loudspeakers Summit Assemblage: Speakers of the World, United! ask for a very specific kind of attention, one that directly touches the body and what it protects; Lenny and the Primitivist’s attention to detail plays out thematically —sometimes in a trickling, fluid obsession, as with the recurring use of small loudspeakers, large loudspeakers, and even larger loudspeakers. By revealing the illusionary foundations of cultural projects in which the only escape is for the purpose of eternal return, Lenny and the Primitivist approached the inside as a special case of the outside wasteland, a site of living, layered presences, fetishizing and fixing their absences on the surface of things. Distortions in time, changes in scale, and results may vary, senses of derealisation and depersonalisation. Makeshift force fields, made-ready objects, corners of the mind, and other-worldly figures mobilized as transports of the imagination capable of stirring the mind out of its single room-squalor and into a larger, more complex wasteland.
Loudspeakers Summit Assemblage: Speakers of the World, United!animated in the artists’ imagination as agents capable of countering the real on really unreal terms. In Lenny and the Primitivist’s work, totems on speakers warp and bend, recurring patterns twisting into oblivion and back. The core fantasy is finding (crafting, capturing) space for the mind to rest, and so finding respite from capitalism’s flights and its dilapidated conditions in order to move the self to sublimity. Despite, or because of, their anachronism in technology, Lenny and the Primitivist seismographically records the sentiment of their generation in such a unique way: obscure fetishes of the commodity world, old-fashioned and faded luxury goods, and archaic totems are imbued with allusions and personal experiences, oscillate between disclosure and concealment, merges textual systems and material allegories to investigate how communication ossifies into symbol, often situating belief systems, whether bureaucratic, economic, or consumerist, within registers of absurd devotion or poetic collapse. Together they examine the conditions under which we trust that loudspeakers continue to serve its intended purpose once they’ve been decommissioned, and how objects and surfaces function as surrogates for the untouchable fears and desires of the inner and outer worlds, which clash harshly in their staggered sculptural pieces.Loudspeakers Summit Assemblage: Speakers of the World, United!constructs not as avant-garde works of art, but by keeping in mind how the marginal proletariat—with whom the artists co-creates the pieces—will experience them, choosing what is closest to their daily life and their imagination, but giving the fragility of the materials the strength of the symbols they embody, and paying homage to the layering of the stories they tell.
Disclaimer: Xevarion Institute respects the freedom of some, if not all, artistic expression(s). The views and opinions expressed by the visitors in their hearts and minds do not represent the stance of Lenny and the Primitivist. However, while a visitor enjoys the freedom of artistic expression and creativity, he/she must also abide by the Laws of Hong Kong and assume responsibilities for opinion and expression by other individual concerned and he/she/it/they/them ideology, religious belief and socio-political conviction.
The Catalyst
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