Absent Friends: Ross/Hafiz Lalani-Jennings

 A celebration planned, guests invited, and a table laid… a host awaits.

 At tables around the world, households gather to think about what might have been, celebrations unrecognized, menu’s unrealized, dinnerware unused, and jokes unheard. Yet, what has divided us has also united us.

 In England, it is tradition to raise a toast to ‘absent friends’, to those in our hearts and minds. Thus, Absent Friends is a toast to our resilience, our courage, our hope, and our support to one another during this most remarkable of years.

 It is a celebration of unity, bringing together a selection of artists whose work’s trace connections between their own personal histories and a larger, collective and shared, understanding of ourselves. Our uniqueness, our beliefs, our fears, and our imaginations.

 Absent Friends features brand new works by Julie Moon, Micah Lexier, and Tessar Lo. As well as works by Noah Brown, Laura Findlay, Catherine Heard, Mitsuo Kimura, Ness Lee, Martin Pearce, and Ed Pien.

Ross/Hafiz Lalani-Jennings would like to thank Robert Birch for providing the opportunity for curate this exhibition, and the artists for their contribution to this vision.

Ross/Hafiz Lalani-Jennings is an independent curator and consultant, with a focus on experiential exhibition making, and the host and presenter of A Room With a View Podcast. He holds a master’s in Curatorial Practice from Central Saint Martins College of Art, London, and a master’s in art history and Visual Culture from the University of Guelph.

His most recent work, GA x ARWAV, a series of pop-up window exhibitions took place during the summer of 2020, in collaboration with General Assembly Pizza.

Ross/Hafiz currently works as a Curatorial Assistant at the Peel Art Gallery, Museum, and Archives (PAMA).