Opening: September 13 | 11am – 5pm
On view: September 13–14, 20–21, 27–28 | 11am – 5pm
Weekday visits by appointment (email info@residencyunlimited.org)
Location: RU House at Colonels Row, Building #404B on Governors Island (map)
Ferry information | Video directions
Please join us for the group exhibition featuring works by RU resident artists: Ľuboš Kotlár, Michal Luft, Gabriel Siams, and Yoav Weinfeld. “Whispers in Plain Sight” is curated by Zhiheng Ashely Zhang, Curatorial & Research Assistant of Residency Unlimited.
A whisper is the quietest of human sounds, yet it carries undeniable force. It holds secrets, urgencies, and truths too fragile to be voiced aloud. It may resist public speech, yet it insists on being heard. The artworks in this exhibition whisper in plain sight, revealing what is present yet overlooked. These murmurs invite viewers into a space of intimacy, a sacred zone that could encounter the living story of other individuals’ lives. Especially those parts in life that are beyond the private, and have become a shared rhythm of the world around us that reshape the present.
Throughout the history of art, artists have sought to convey hidden stories and personal reflections, speaking quietly above the noise of time. The artists in this exhibition further this pursuit, using contemporary mediums to open new ways of perceiving.
Artists on the first floor depict whispers from a personal tone that reflect a shared memory. Yoav Weinfeld’s painting series experiments with aluminum as canvas, using Acrylic paints that cannot be absorbed on this surface. This unstable materiality and the possibility of detachment become a metaphor for memory’s fragility, and the alienation of presence. His works evoke both the silence before the hurricane and the restrained rage in face of the forces in life that make us feel small, vulnerable, and at times invisible. Meanwhile, Michal Luft works with photography to expose the paradox of being both invisible and hyper-visible, overlooked yet conspicuously present. In On Photography, Susan Sontag describes the camera as a symbolic weapon and an instrument of control, echoing the dynamics of hunting. Inspired by this theory, Luft links the visual of ghillie suit, often used for hunting, to the act of photography. In her work, the suit becomes a tool of concealment that whispers of isolation, vulnerability, and the persistence of presence even in attempted erasure. When external forces eclipse personal agency, individuals often retreat into protective postures, allowing their identities to blur into the background. Both artists capture this fragile condition, where disappearance and exposure are inseparably bound.
On the second floor, the whispers gather into a more collective, quiet chanting. Gabriel Siams uses photography and leather remnants – sourced from Brooklyn’s fashion warehouses – to map fragments of Manhattan, tracing the tension between the imagined and the lived city. The contrast between Manhattan and Brooklyn becomes a stand-in for differences found between any cities, suggesting how physical and emotional distance can generate different rhythms of belonging. His practice recalls the shifting perspectives of A Tale of Two Cities: relocation not only alters geography, but also reconfigures destiny. In this way, Siams’s maps whisper meditations on migration, displacement, and the subtle ways in which everyday life is shaped by the ground beneath us. The installation and video by Ľuboš Kotlár, reimagine the Romani ancestral traditions and how Roma bodies are seen and understood. The moon ritual referenced in his installation whispers a quiet prayer that the larger cycles of renewal and fortune may be the only forces to depend on. While in his video, the Roma body counters the static stereotypes often imposed by the majority, appearing instead as active, striving, and self-directed. Together, Kotlár’s works reflect on how communities are often reduced to categories, as though difference itself were a barrier. Instead, he foregrounds resilience and imagination, suggesting that identity, like the greenscreen, holds infinite potential. His works hint toward other ways of seeing, subtle gestures that endure and open space for renewal.
Click above to see the images from the program
Short bios of artists:
Ľuboš Kotlár is a visual artist and photographer currently based in Prague, the Czech Republic. His work has long been focused on exploring concepts of non-normative time and space, drawing primarily from the field of queer theory. At a time when the future seems uncertain and unpredictable, he seeks to redirect our attention to the present moment and the experiences taking place within it. This approach is in stark contrast to traditional reproductive futurism, which privileges linear progress and stability. In addition, elements of liminality, his Romani heritage, physicality, and occasionally a bit of mystification often enter his work. These influences manifest themselves in his work mainly through site- and time-specific strategies of creating. He often creates processual/dynamic installations that incorporate an element of spontaneity and unpredictability, allowing for a dynamic interaction between the artwork and its audience. Ľuboš Kotlár is one of the 2025 laureates of the Oskar Čepan Award for contemporary art in Slovakia.
Michal Luft is an interdisciplinary artist based in Antwerp, Belgium. Her artistic practice encompasses photography and site-specific installations, in which she explores ordinary objects and spaces as reflections of human fragility and vulnerability. She is interested in the thin line between what we see and what is bubbling beneath the surface, the undercurrent of the everyday and the mundane. She captures, interprets, and meticulously recreates elements that may appear familiar but behave in unexpected ways. These objects – through their repetitive function, misplaced location, or redundancy – hint at deeper, often hidden issues. In her current fellowship at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, she carefully researches the layered notion of home and belonging through multiple perspectives. This study explores how personal and collective histories of displacement and migration, sorrow, and loss shape our perceptions of home.
Gabriel Siams’ trajectory as a transmedia artist has been shaped by an early immersion in religious environments, which introduced him to the power of symbolism and its potential for subversion. His research focuses on the connections between ancient symbologies — some predating Christianity — and their ongoing presence in contemporary culture. Siams also explores the potential for transformation of materials, moments of transition, and states of uncertainty – the intermediate, the ambiguous, the malleable. Through installation, photography, moving image, performance and sound, his practice takes on various forms, situated between narrative and documentary, without fully conforming to either.
Yoav Weinfeld is a multimedia artist and curator working across painting, installation, and video. His work creates systems where material, surface, and light shift constantly to question the essence of the image, its politics and function, and its relationship to emotional states such as numbness, repressed aggression and loss. Drawing from personal narratives, corporate aesthetics and digital imagery, he explores the fragile relationship of representation and reality. His recent work explores how historical moments transform theoretical questions about representation into lived, urgent realities of trauma. Weinfeld’s process blends fluids, humor, and sexuality with a deadpan tone, balancing playfulness and anxiety. Using airbrush and hand-cut stencils, he creates high-tech surfaces, surrendering control to gravity and viscosity. His work invites viewers to confront the tension of mechanical precision and the raw realities of failure, where memory, perception, and materiality collide.
This program is supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding, Artis and FLAD (Luso-American Development Foundation).
RU is grateful for the partnership with Governors Island Arts.
