A capsule is a vessel that holds. It gathers time within its walls, holding the known and the unknown. It holds presence and absence together, a quiet weight that both conceals and reveals. It is here and not here, a volume and silence, filled with what is fleeting and permanent. This week, we enter these vessels that hold memories, bodies, feelings and absences.
Marina Tabassum's Serpentine Pavilion 2025 is 'A Capsule in Time', where, as she informs us, its "temporality has a presence". Its wooden form symbolically holds the slow passage of time and resilience, as a fiction of timelessness and permanence through inert materiality. Salman Toor's paintings in his solo show 'Wish Maker' insist on the tactile presence of bodies (queer, brown, diasporic) as granular marks of being. The article's author quotes Judith Butler on the triangulation of bodies, assembly and politics: "think about bodies together, what holds them there, their
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conditions of persistence and of power". Vulnerable yet certain, these are figures as vessels.
British designer Grace Prince's furniture designs trace absence, giving form to what is between weight and lightness. Waanyi artist Judy Watson's ancestral cartographies map what cannot be seen, holding memory in each mark and layer: a landscape of personal echoes between bodies of water and ancestral land. Even in Alison Thumel's reading of Frank Lloyd Wright in the collection of poems called 'Architect', grief becomes an architecture of memory—each line and curve holding loss and longing.
It is a pause, a breath, a desire, holding what has passed and what waits to emerge, an elusive capsule that contains everything and nothing at once.

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