This new painting by Tala Madani is the latest in the artist’s renowned series of Disco works. Good Times is set in Madani’s imagined nightclub, usually a space of ecstatic reverie and humour, but here conveying an eeriness and uncanny quality. A group of figures form a shadowy mass with largely indistinguishable features, some bearing a disco ball in the place of their head, another with a disco ball for a torso. Suspended above them is a man whose entire form has been supplanted with a disco ball. Some of the figures below cast their gaze upwards in confusion at this strange light fixture, whilst one of the revellers crawls through the shiny reflection on the nightclub floor. In this way, these mysterious disco dancers reveal the underbelly of human relationships.

Renowned for his use of text and phrases, which function as political slogans, merging activism with commercial marketing, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s stencil works function as a call to arms, politically activating the viewer that is reflected within the mirrored stainless steel medium. The artist is inviting the viewer into the work, bringing together the slogan it displays and the environment it is projected into. The works become cloaked in the reflection of where it is displayed, implicating the viewer into the message represented in the stenciled text.

The cultural and political possibilities of food are central to his practice and serve as a point of departure for many of his works, and the playfully insistent title examines racial stereotypes, while at the same time highlighting an ingredient which Tiravanija regularly cooks with during his performances to incite communal action and discussion.

Within her work, Lina Iris Viktor embraces a rich tapestry of cultural references, symbolism and sensory experience, integrating forms from the West African visual cultures of the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Benin. Ethically-sourced earthen materials – including silk from India, natural raffia from Madagascar, 24-carat gold, banana yarn and bronze – come together in formations that reference traditional West African pottery, jewellery and woodwork, as well as Modernist African architecture. Bridging geographical and historical boundaries, Viktor synthesises her ancestral heritage with contemporary modes of expression to foreground the political and aesthetic legacies of material extraction and exchange.

Reflecting on her early experiences as an Iraqi refugee in Sweden, Hayv Kahraman’s new body of work examines the ways in which colonial practices in the field of botany continue to perpetuate hierarchical structures and gendered metaphors within the natural world and, by extension, sociopolitical contexts. The artist experiments with marbling her own handmade linen surfaces using the ebru technique, which translates as ‘the art of clouds’. Inhabiting their intentionally irregular landscapes, Kahraman’s defiantly anonymous female figures traverse and challenge grid-like systems designed to impose order and identification. In Kahraman’s hands, the technique of marbling becomes an act of defiance, a means of building alternative architectures of refuge and resilience.

Sophie von Hellermann’s paintings recall the look of fables, legends, and traditional stories that are imbued with the workings of her subconscious rather than the content of existing images. Her romantic, pastel-washed canvases are often installed to suggest complex narrative threads. Von Hellermann applies pure pigment directly onto unprimed canvas, her use of broad-brushed washes imbues a sense of weightlessness to her pictures. The paintings draw upon current affairs as often and as fluidly as they borrow from the imagery of classical mythology and literature to create expansive imaginary places. In subject matter and style, von Hellermann tests imagination against reality.