![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/dot.png\")
\n Emily LaBarge<\/p>\n
\t Candice Lin \t
\n Emily LaBarge<\/p>\n
Round and round it goes: the artist\u2019s installation takes a pilgrimage to the existential state of not-knowing.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/labarge_candice-lin_image_1.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Candice Lin: g\/hosti, installation view. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Matt Greenwood. \u00a9 Above Ground Studio.<\/p>\n
Candice Lin: g\/hosti, Whitechapel Gallery, 78-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, United Kingdom, through March 1, 2026<\/p>\n
\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n
There is a story and the story is a circle, or maybe a spiral, without distinct beginning or end, and the story encloses you, turns round and round, continues and starts again, and the story is a parable, or a fable, or a fairy tale, set in the special, oneiric time specific to that genre, but which these days seems to spill and unspool its non-time time, its strange limbo and deferrals, into the very real present and the unspecified future, disorienting, not like a magic trick but a spell or a curse or a haunting, although it is possible that to turn round and round is not necessarily a futile repetition, but a pilgrimage to the existential state of not-knowing, the discomfort of the story without conclusion: it keeps us going, in any case, even in the worst of times, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/labarge_candice-lin_image_2.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Candice Lin: g\/hosti, installation view. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Matt Greenwood. \u00a9 Above Ground Studio.<\/p>\n
Around the white walls we read of a man, who has nothing, ventures into the world seeking sustenance and shelter. He encounters at first inanimate objects (a napkin folded into the shape of a skull: \u201cdeath,\u201d he calls it and puts it in his pocket), and then a succession of animals\u2014a dog, a bigger dog, a rabbit, a bird, a bigger bird, a cat, a bigger cat, and this bigger cat brings him a wife, while the birds have already built him a house, and food and gold and other fortunes big and small have appeared, there\u2019s just one small catch: they are all plucked from his body as tumors before they transform into something fantastic, each one leaving a gaping wound behind. Inside this story, which is also more than one story (halfway through, the man is replaced by an \u201cI,\u201d who seems to have lost a \u201cyou,\u201d and probably more, but dreams, like the nothing man, of how to transform experience into images), we find ourselves within an actual (physical versus psychical) spiral, or a version of \u201cnested circles within circles,\u201d which is one of the phrases the Concord-born, LA-based artist Candice Lin has used to describe her labyrinthine installation, titled g\/hosti.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/labarge_candice-lin_image_3.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Candice Lin: g\/hosti, installation view (detail). Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Matt Greenwood. \u00a9 Above Ground Studio.<\/p>\n
Lin\u2019s work often traverses the micro and the macro, the specific and the universal, not so much combining as collapsing or exploding their binaries into multilayered, immersive installations in which materiality contains multitudes. A smell, a substance, a taste, a touch, a sound carries more than it seems, and all five senses are folded into the activity of image-making. (You see, I had to travel through at least two paragraphs of rippling layers before I even got to the artist\u2019s name, although her practice is, at any rate, sui generis.) g\/hosti is no departure, even its title a kind of capacious carapace: neither ghost nor host, it is each at once, and together they are at least one of the earliest versions of the word \u201cguest,\u201d which originally meant both \u201ca person who is invited to visit someone\u2019s home, or to attend a particular event or social occasion\u201d and \u201ca person who is unknown, a stranger.\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/labarge_candice-lin_image_4.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Candice Lin: g\/hosti, installation view. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Matt Greenwood. \u00a9 Above Ground Studio.<\/p>\n
A later version of the word (Victorian versus Old English) means \u201ca parasitic animal or plant. Cf. guest-fly,\u201d first used in Dr. Thomas Spencer Cobbold\u2019s Entozoa (1864), a now obsolete taxonomy of parasitic worms. \u201cIn the case of the adult worm,\u201d he writes in his extensively illustrated study, \u201cthe happiest cures are readily affected by the expulsion of the \u2018guest,\u2019 but as regards the larvae the case is very different.\u201d It was this eerie (expel the guest!) and infrequently used form of the stuttering ghost-host-guest hybrid, with its funny uptick i like a cartoonish afterthought, that turned around in my brain like (pardon the coincidence, this really is the correct term) an earworm as I wandered through Lin\u2019s winding installation\u2014a curling cardboard labyrinth covered with fantastical and sometimes terrifying painted scenes of animals and humans, or their remains, in exchanges so logic-defying they seem, for me at least, to demand the projection of hallucinatory narratives.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/labarge_candice-lin_image_5.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Candice Lin: g\/hosti, installation view. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Matt Greenwood. \u00a9 Above Ground Studio.<\/p>\n
A wolf, yellow eyes flashing, prowling in long grass. A disembodied cat arm crudely holding up (pointing to? Can cats point? [what can\u2019t they do!]) an iPhone. A skeleton arm holding up a raw steak from which spouts a tiny flame. Cats gathered around a table on which sit glass canisters of something yellow, possibly glowing. Dogs tearing apart a stag, its head wrenched back in agony. A skeleton about to be fucked by a dog or a wolf. The situation reversed. A bird, a strawberry, a hanging frog, a crucified cat, a lonely little school desk surrounded by abstruse symbols. This is a syncretic atmosphere of rich imagery at once recognizable and just harrowingly out of reach. We don\u2019t imagine animals this way, though we know humans, animals too, are capable of much worse.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/labarge_candice-lin_image_6.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Candice Lin: g\/hosti, installation view (detail). Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Matt Greenwood. \u00a9 Above Ground Studio.<\/p>\n
g\/hosti is striking in that its nonhuman figures, who seem to stand and walk and act with autonomy, even impunity, do not seem anthropomorphized but like actors in a passion play, putting on a great tableau for their guests\u2014us viewers\u2014who enter the space of the gallery from likewise troubled times. Lin has said that this work emerges from the contemporary context of American politics, including its protracted investment in the genocide in Gaza that has been livestreamed by its victims for more than two years. Short animated videos play at various twists and turns of the labyrinth, affixed to its flimsy but vivid walls, their soundtracks overlapping long before and after they are viewed. Sounds of protest, chanting, conflict, yelling, something fearful, filled with rage. Fires blazing. Crackling and heaving and then, funnily enough, the absolute banger Underworld anthem \u201cBorn Slippy\u201d\u2014she said come over, come over, she smiled at you boyyyyyyyy.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/labarge_candice-lin_image_7.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Candice Lin: g\/hosti, installation view. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Matt Greenwood. \u00a9 Above Ground Studio.<\/p>\n
On the screens themselves the images match what we hear\u2014bodies fighting, houses and forests on fire\u2014but like everything in g\/hosti they shape-shift seamlessly into something else: a butterfly, a dog that becomes a snake, an ouroboros that shatters into bones that then become protestors. Lin has described these animations, which require hundreds of drawings per thirty seconds, as a kind of solace: the act of giving shape and contour to a complexity of context and experience that otherwise overwhelms with its shapeless unease\u2014too close, too hot, too ugly to understand. \u201cMaybe this is similar to the act of prayer,\u201d she says in the catalog in conversation with the writer Lucy Ives. \u201cIn drawing, you are witnessing: I see this, I feel this, I labor to trace the outlines of these gestures, these bodies, these people, these landscapes; it feels like doing something, though of course it\u2019s not, really.\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/labarge_candice-lin_image_8.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Candice Lin: g\/hosti, installation view. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Matt Greenwood. \u00a9 Above Ground Studio.<\/p>\n
Amid so much wasted energy in the contemporary (shudder) \u201cdiscourse\u201d about art and politics, Lin\u2019s work captivates with its bold, disturbing, elegant material summation of politics as a practice, as a way of seeing and making that struggles with its realities, its longue dur\u00e9e, its not-knowing\u2014as opposed to politics as a set of ideas or a perfectly formed assertion, a posture, a demand, a thing somehow outside of us to be studied and contained rather than lived. As if we have a choice. We are the guest, the host, and the stranger, the worm to be expelled. \u201cWithout knowing it: life,\u201d reads one gnomic sentence in the looping story. Ain\u2019t that the truth.<\/p>\n