This April in our Mezzanine Gallery, we are excited to present a new exhibition by Mandy Merzaban.
Fake Love & Institutional Longing (BTS) is a multimedia poetry project about how Orientalism, the West’s destructive imaginary of the ‘East’, changes form over time: from masking itself in contemporary culture and institutions within neoliberalism to love and longing within diasporic experience. The project unravels within the magnetic aura and altar of K‑pop, choreography, and sonic artifacts, using BTS’s (방탄소년단) Fake Love (2018) as a kinetic cypher, or key, for the project’s poems and archival research.
It begins in the Royal Asiatic Society archive in London, a colonial‑era institution of imperial knowledge‑making across East, Southeast, and West Asia, and threads documents of Orientalist discourse, imaginaries, and colonial bureaucracy across centuries. The project centres on a multi‑lingual banquet menu from the 1889 International Congress of Orientalists in Stockholm, where poems about European cuisines are written in languages of so-called ‘Orient’ from Chinese, Arabic, Javanese, to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. It features cyanotype prints, poetry, and sonic reinterpretations by Tzekin of BTS, K-pop, and AI‑generated music based on the project’s themes.
Mandy Merzaban is an artist and writer whose practice in poetic listening and eavesdropping explores how power shapes language, silence, and care within institutional life. Working across experimental poetry, drawing, and text-based media, her work examines organisational cultures and their emotional architectures. In 2025, she published a heart gills with Short Pieces That Move, Rotterdam, and was Poet-in-Residence at John Hansard Gallery. She has held fellowships at Tate and Delfina Foundation (2022) and was founding curator at Barjeel Art Foundation (2009–2018).
Credits
Editor: Kate Briggs
Sound: Tzekin (Justin Tam)
Music: BTS (방탄소년단); & AI generated: ‘Deep Fake Love,’ ‘Blood, Sweat and Theory’
Many archival documents on display are credited to The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
All images are original artworks created using transformed elements from BTS performances, and fan made media. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the original rights holders.