'I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.'
'For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have many thousand…and these selves of which we are built up, one on top of the other, as plates are piled on a waiter's hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own…and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.'
-Orlando, Virginia Woolf (1928)
Pi Artworks proudly presents An Ode to Orlando, an expansive group exhibition curated by Marcelle Joseph, featuring a cross-generational and international group of artists alongside the inaugural collection of furniture designs by Ada Interiors. The exhibition reimagines the gallery space as the private home of a fictional art collector set in London in the present day. Based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, this particular aesthete – a passionate, brilliant and eccentric character who lives and breathes art - navigates fluidly through time and gender, au courant with the latest cultural trends and equally in tune with the past. Creating a dialogue between contemporary art and artisanal furniture, the exhibition is divided into two areas: a drawing room and a study, representing the twin selves of Orlando as both a man and a woman. Orlando’s reimagined London residence will be a place of sanctuary and escape, a site that is beyond time as Woolf’s Orlando lives for more than 300 years into modern times without ageing perceptibly. Here, we are forever young.