Leila Lallali

Leila Lallali

good luck

22.10.2026 - 22.11.2026

Opening on Thursday, 22 October 2026 at 6 pm

Artist's statement:

Approaching forty, I find myself increasingly aware of time—not as an abstract measure, but as something encountered through the body and through the ordinary objects that accompany it. Time accumulates, marks, ripens, evaporates and withdraws. It asks to be managed, performed, resisted.

This work begins with four ordinary objects—candles, lipsticks, perfume and ripe fruit. Each stages a different relationship to time. A candle measures duration through disappearance. A lipstick wears away through repeated acts of self-presentation, inscribing the face into social legibility. Perfume unfolds through evaporation, leaving only a trace—its presence inseparable from its fading. Fruit exists at the edge of peak and decline, desired most at the moment it begins to perish.

Together, these objects become quiet instruments of time. They structure daily rituals and orient us to cycles of maintenance, consumption, renewal and loss. Each is defined by its own depletion, disappearing through the very act of being used. Their meaning is not fixed within them, but realised through touch, gesture and use. They only come fully into being through the body.

Made during a period of burnout, the work became entangled with an attempt to locate a different rhythm of being—between doing, undoing and letting be. The process resisted resolution. Forms were repeatedly adjusted, softened, held back. In this way, the work became less about mastery than about endurance, uncertainty and the search for softness within hardness.

In this suspension, the pressure to perform becomes visible. To age well, to remain desirable, to maintain coherence—to keep things fresh, intact, in good condition—these demands persist, even as time becomes more acute. The labour of maintenance begins to feel endless; the performance increasingly excessive, even absurd. There is, increasingly, no time for it.

Yet the effort to maintain is also an attempt to exert control over what cannot ultimately be controlled. We adjust, preserve, renew, touch up, hold on. We try to catch things at the right moment—to remain in the right condition, to make something last, to keep ourselves together. But duration, decay, desire and the body do not entirely obey.

The title good luck sits within this tension. It can be read as encouragement, resignation, irony or tenderness: good luck keeping it together; good luck staying desirable; good luck getting the timing right. It acknowledges the strange amount of effort involved in managing things whose outcomes are never entirely ours to determine. Perhaps some of what we experience as failure, exhaustion or inadequacy is also a matter of circumstance—of timing, chance and the limits of control.

The work does not resolve this tension. It holds it. Between use and refusal, between ripeness and stillness, between presence and disappearance, between the body as lived and the body as seen. Through the process of making, the work also became a site for re-encountering the self—not as fixed or coherent, but as something continually reshaped through exhaustion, resistance and care.

good luck is not an answer to these conditions. It is perhaps what remains to be said when there is no perfect way to manage them.