GALLERY 2:

‘Sites of Conflict’ is not a historical survey but a psychological mapping of repetition and manipulation. By engaging with historical rupture and means of information warfare, Ellis exposes the recurrent cycles by which propaganda, nationalism, and ideological polarisation operate. The utopian promises of the French Revolution, the Civil Rights struggle for equality, and today’s disinformation-fuelled culture wars are not presented as discrete episodes but as interconnected nodes in a rhizomatic network — a Deleuzian structure of non-linear relations in which histories fold into one another and ideologies reappear in mutated form. Within this framework, Ellis’s practice denotes a history not of linear progression, but of recursive transformation, where familiar power structures return under new guises, and rupture becomes a rhythm.

Underlying Ellis’s visual language is a deep engagement with the mechanisms of political messaging. His fascination with the language of authority and reactionary groups — how slogans, manifestos, and branding operate as tools of persuasion — finds its form in the surface of the paintings themselves. In ‘Dēmokratía’ and across the exhibition, Ellis draws from the visual vernacular of public messaging: street posters, political notices, protest signage, and scrawled graffiti. These elements appear not as quotation, but as residue — partially obscured, torn, scratched out, or layered, as if pasted over one another in the chaos of a city wall. The works reference this palimpsestic surface: rough, distressed grounds bearing traces of pigment, decayed paper, and embedded text that reveal both the erosion of time and the aggression of erasure. These scarred surfaces function as both metaphor and medium for the contested terrain of public discourse, where ideology is never static but constantly inscribed, challenged, and rewritten.

In this way, ‘Sites of Conflict’ offers a complex confrontation with the past as it merges with the present — a visual field where history repeats, breaks, and reasserts itself. Ellis invites us to look not for a single truth, but for the unstable patterns through which meaning and power circulate. As both artist and curator, Zavier Ellis is known for his deep engagement with the psychological and socio-political. ‘Sites of Conflict’ is his most ambitious and urgent statement to date: an inquiry into the logics of control, resistance, and return — and the fractured surfaces upon which our shared histories are written.

Zavier Ellis read History of Modern Art at Manchester University (1993-1996) before undertaking a Masters in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School (2003-2005). He has exhibited alongside contemporary and 20th century artists including Peter Blake, Michael Craig-Martin, Marcus Harvey, Damien Hirst, Julian Opie, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Derek Ridgers, Antoni Tàpies, Mark Titchner, Gavin Turk, Keith Tyson and Mark Wallinger. Ellis has exhibited globally including Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Pera Museum, Istanbul; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; Saatchi Gallery, London; Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre, Klaipėda; Royal West Academy, Bristol; Dean Clough, Halifax; Paul Stolper, London; Galerie Heike Strelow, Frankfurt; Raid Projects, Los Angeles; and ENIA Gallery, Pireas. His work is featured in prominent private collections including the seminal Sammlung Annette und Peter Nobel, Zurich and Beth Rudin DeWoody, West Palm Beach