11 February @ 10:00 – 28 February @ 18:00
Image: Autumn, Ben Raz (2025), oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm. Part of the exhibition, ‘Spores’. Courtesy of the artist. 
Image: Leprous, Ben Raz (2025), oil on canvas, 100 x 150 cm. Part of the exhibition, ‘Spores’. Courtesy of the artist. 
Image: Fisherman, Ben Raz (2025), oil on velvet, 73 x 103 cm. Part of the exhibition, ‘Spores’. Courtesy of the artist. 
Image: Battersea Park, Ben Raz (2025), oil on canvas, 57 x 110cm. Part of the exhibition, ‘Spores’. Courtesy of the artist. 
Images: Leprous, Ben Raz (2025), oil on canvas, 100 x 150cm. Part of the ‘Spores’ exhibition. Courtesy of the artist.
Spores brings together a body of work exploring natural processes, cycles, and the shifting dynamics of meaning, function, and language. Across a series of landscape paintings, nature emerges not as a passive backdrop but as an active, adaptive presence. Paths, clearings, and subtle traces of occupation appear throughout, yet growth, erosion, and seasonal rhythms continuously reshape what remains. These landscapes become sites of quiet tension, where imposed order and organic change intersect, dissolve, and transform over time.
At the centre of the exhibition stands a raised root cellar structure, functioning as both artefact and monument. Traditionally designed to preserve food under controlled subterranean conditions, the structure is removed from its original context, repositioned within the gallery, and wrapped in archived exhibition texts.
Built using only a single cross-sectional diagram as reference, the cellar is deliberately misinterpreted, exposing an interior logic intended to explain function while remaining unusable in practice. Nearby, lanterns removed from their holders and rendered redundant by the gallery’s light operate as imperfect repetitions of a familiar form, suggesting an absent action. The work foregrounds systems of preservation—temporal, architectural, and cultural—and the instability that arises when these systems are displaced from their intended purpose.
Together, the works reflect on transience, obsolescence, and endurance. In Spores, nature preserves itself through decay and renewal, revealing transformation through instability. Figures in many of the landscapes are partially absorbed by darkness, while the lanterns lie abandoned, their utility uncertain. Through these shifts between visibility and concealment, function and failure, the exhibition highlights the gradual erosion of authority in both structures and ideas.
Exhibition details
Dates: 11-28 February
Opening: 11 February, 6-9pm
Location: Unit 1, Lewisham Retail Park, Loampit Vale, London SE13 7RZ
Admission: Free
The exhibition will be viewable by appointment only except for the opening.
Contact:
benraz95@gmail.com
tarzankingofthejungle123@gmail.com
Contributing artists
Tarzan Kingofthejungle
Website: tarzankingofthejungle.com
Instagram: @tarzan_kingofthejungle
Based in London, Tarzan Kingofthejungle (b. 1998) works works across film, sculpture, performance, and writing. His practice involves constructing scenes from borrowed elements—props, lines, symbols, or characters—isolated and stripped of their original contexts, such as a discarded lantern, a lens flare, or a soundtrack. Through dismantling, manipulating, and rearranging these fragments, he explores how meaning shifts and emerges through narrative potential and residue.
Recent exhibitions include Metropolis (curated by Jacob Sirkin), Greatorex St, London; Alpine XP, Plicnik Space Initiative; Reset Atelier, Brussels; Planned Obsolescence, Seager Gallery, London; Log 2: NovoStruct Hard Hat Area, Plicnik Space Initiative; Half Truths (curated by Vanessa Murrell), London; OTO (Lux Moving Image, RCA), Fold, London.
Ben Raz
Website: www.benraz.org
Instagram: @benr.az
Ben Raz (b. 1995) lives and works in London. He graduated from the Slade School of Art in 2021. Raz’s paintings synthesise varied interests, experiences, observations, and imaginings, engaging themes of desire, the clandestine, the sublime, and modern decadence. These ideas are reinforced through the coalescence of disparate images and information.
Many of the paintings are characterised by ambiguity and a lack of clarity; Raz is interested in how an image can simultaneously reveal and withhold meaning.
Recent exhibitions include presentations at Bolding Gallery, Pusher Gallery, Xxijra Hii, and Hew Hood Gallery.
About SET’s Associate Members Programme
This exhibition is presented as part of SET’s Associate Members Programme, which offers artists studio space alongside access to project spaces and opportunities to independently curate exhibitions, workshops, and events.
The programme supports a wide range of practices, from performance and installation to music, sound, print, and textiles, and is designed to provide space, visibility, and development opportunities for early-career and underrepresented artists working in London.