SARAH DOBAI & LITTLE WARSAW
Shock Absorber
Until February 28 2026
Danielle Arnaud Gallery
by appointment only
123 Kennington Road, London SE11 6SF, UK
The exhibition brings together works by Budapest based artist collective Little Warsaw and London based artist Sarah Dobai. The premise for the show relates to their ongoing conversation which began with their shared interest in speculative fiction.
The Lost Sculpture 2025, by Little Warsaw is perhaps the most enigmatic work in the exhibition. It is an extremely fragile clay sculpture representing a larger-than-life eye, a fragment of a large unknown sculpture created between 1914 – 1944 which has since disappeared.
Destroyed by the secret police for unknown reasons - its history is shrouded in mystery…
Little Warsaw’s work deconstructs the promises of socialist utopias, which can also appear as forgotten political alternatives with their paradoxes and contradictions – as Jean Marc Prevost writes in the exhibition leaflet.
LITTLE WARSAW is the collaborative practice of András Gálik (Budapest, 1970) and Bálint Havas (Budapest, 1971), active since 1995. They live and work in Budapest. Conceived as an evolving project, Little Warsaw addresses historical memory and confronts personal encounters with social experience through films, installations, and a wide variety of media. Since 2003, Little Warsaw’s work has been widely exhibited internationally. They have had solo exhibitions at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; AZKM; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst GFZK, Leipzig; and Secession, Vienna. Their projects have been included in the 2nd Berlin Biennial; the 50th Venice Biennale; Manifesta 7 in Rovereto; the 12th Bienal de Cuenca; as well as in numerous group exhibitions throughout the world — e.g., Time and Again at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Re_dis_trans – Voltage of Relocation and Displacement at Apexart, New York; and the travelling exhibition Tee with Nefertiti at Mathaf, Doha, Qatar; IVAM, Valencia; and Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Not In My Name at CCA, Tel Aviv; OFF-Biennale, Budapest; and The Problem of God at K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Little Warsaw’s works are held in several prestigious international public and private collections, such as: Centre Pompidou, Paris; MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest; Muzeum Współczesne, Wrocław; Kontakt — The Art Collection of ERSTE Foundation, Vienna; Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes; Art Collection Telekom, Frankfurt; and Kadist Foundation, Paris. Little Warshaw is represented by Erna Hecey Luxembourg since 2013.
Jean-Marc Prévost is an art historian and Chief Curator of Heritage. He has held key positions at major cultural institutions and is renowned for his curatorial work in contemporary art. He served as Director of the Contemporary Art Museum of Rochechouart, where he organized notable exhibitions featuring international artists such as Rodney Graham, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Richard Deacon, Rineke Dijkstra, Gillian Wearing, Douglas Gordon, and Gabriel Orozco. In 2012, Prevost became director of Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nîmes, where he curated critically acclaimed solo exhibitions by Stan Douglas, Walid Raad, Anne Imhof, Suzanne Lafont, Rayyane Tabet, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Weber, Yto Barrada, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Anna Boghiguian, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Tarik Kiswanson, Rosalind Nashashibi, and Glenn Ligon. Under his leadership, the museum also presented ambitious thematic shows such as Norman Foster on Art, Suspended Choreographies: Contemporary Art in Vietnam, Personal Cuts: Art in Zagreb from 1950 to Today, and A Different Way to Move: Minimalism and Postmodern Dance. Among his international projects, he curated the 10th anniversary exhibition of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, presented at both the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the Museum of Modern Art in Seoul. In 2005, he curated Leviathan by Ernesto Neto at the Panthéon in Paris as part of the Festival d’Automne. In 2025 and Tarik Kiswanson - Fora do Tempo, Fondacao Ibère Camargo, Porto Allegre, Brazil.
