The exhibition takes its title from an iconic scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, in which the declaration “there is no band” exposes the illusion of performance. Here, silence becomes a space where focus sharpens through the value of contemplative time. In a cultural moment defined by acceleration, overabundance of information, and the relentless demand for productivity, No Hay Banda proposes quietness and restraint as deliberate artistic positions.
Vandria Borari is an Indigenous ceramic artist from the Borari territory of Alter do Chão, in the Brazilian Amazon. Her practice is grounded in ancestral knowledge systems and longstanding relationships between humans, plants, and the forest understood as a living body. For No Hay Banda, Borari presents Yupirungáwa (meaning “origin” in Nheengatu), a body of work developed through a dialogue between Indigenous knowledge and archaeobotanical research, in collaboration with anthropologist Myrtle Pearl Shock. This series comprises four monumental ceramic sculptures of Amazonian seeds, Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa), tucumã (Astrocaryum vulgare), forest muruci (Byrsonima crispa), and curuá (Ananas erectifolius), modelled on botanical remains from archaeological sites in the Lower Amazon. Enlarged to a human scale and finished with pigments recalling the carbonised materiality of excavated seeds, these works invite the viewer to learn from nature’s tempo. Through scale and material, Borari’s work foregrounds the forest as an interdependent system shaped by time and transmission across generations.
Petra Feriancová’s Playgrounds series unfolds as a quiet meditation on observation and lived experience. Developed over many years, the project brings together archival material and photographs, returning to public playgrounds as sites where memory, action, and abandonment intersect. The series spans generations: some images were taken by Feriancová’s father in the 1970s, while others were taken by the artist herself more than forty years later. Once spaces of play, these structures appear emptied of their original function, transformed into stages for reflection rather than activity. For Feriancová, the playground becomes a place of wandering and intentional looking, encountered differently across life stages: first as an observer, then through parenthood. Stripped of nostalgia, the images register subtle shifts in perception and duration, foregrounding moments of pause and quiet presence. In Playgrounds, Feriancová resists linear narratives, instead allowing meaning to emerge through accumulated observation and the slow passing of time. In addition, Feriancová will exhibit photographs from the Hands (2017–2025) series, which captures hands in constant motion yet without a specific end goal; these works favour intrinsic value over function.
Karoliina Hellberg’s work immerses the viewer in a pictorial realm shaped by repetition and resonance. Her paintings weave dream-like stories into the textures of the everyday, drawing on motifs such as interiors, plants, animals, and textiles that hover between memory and imagination. Working in the space between fantasy and recall, Hellberg employs intense colour and confident brushwork to collapse distinctions between foreground and background, flatten perspective, and subtly unsettle how we move through the image.
New compositions by Sofia Silva reflect a process of moving forwards and backwards through painting, cutting, and leaving fragments behind. Her works operate within restrained, sparsely inhabited spaces where light and surface are treated with measured precision. Camera bianca (2026) depicts an intimate domestic interior in which the silhouette of branches placed in a vase emerges along a thin line of light. Derived from an archival photograph of Venini vases, the composition remains minimal yet carefully modulated, articulated through subtle tonal gradations and inscribed with the phrase con tutto il cuore (“with all my heart”), taken from a Catholic prayer of confession. Detached from a specific time or place, the painting unfolds within a space defined by absence. A second, smaller work adopts a materially similar but conceptually opposed approach: combining a printed page with painterly interventions, it stages the collapse of silence and contemplation. Titled Non rompetemi i coglioni (Girl Interrupted While Reading), the work registers the difficulty of maintaining solitude and focus in an environment marked by turbulence and informational overload.
The exhibition approaches silence as an active condition: a method of resistance and a generative framework for making. Working through practices defined by restraint, withholding, and careful attention, the participating artists foreground minimal actions, subtle shifts, and processes that resist pageantry. Viewers are invited to listen closely, to remain with uncertainty, and to encounter meaning as something that builds gradually.
