Echoes from Elsewhere – A Non-Solo of Leda Vaneva in association with Yuko Fukuba Johnsson, Jinki Lau and Silvester Mok is one chapter within Non-Local Non-Solo 2025, a cross-geographical exhibition series that asks what it means to share space, authorship, and imagination across distance. Bulgarian-born, Helsinki-based artist Leda Vaneva is invited to Hong Kong through the Helsinki–Hongkong Exchange Programme, organised in partnership with Myymälä2 and bridging to the local art space POINTSMAN. Her practice, grounded in moving image and digital speculation, becomes a point of departure rather than a centre: a non-solo where her works resonate with, and are re-framed by, three Hong Kong–based artists who extend her questions into local materials, histories and urban textures.

The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of thresholds. From the street, visitors first encounter Complementarity, a two-channel video whose visibility from outside the gallery emphasises looking in from elsewhere. Borrowing its title from a principle in quantum mechanics, the work takes seriously the idea that not everything can be seen at once, and that every act of showing implies a simultaneous hiding. Vaneva’s abstract visual field – where sky could be ground and air might be water – disorients habitual orientation. Rather than offering a stable scene, Complementarity foregrounds uncertainty as a generative condition: a reminder that digital images, like physical realities, are always partial, contingent and under construction.

Inside the gallery, the first major projection, Contingent Space, extends this instability into an immersive architecture. Here Vaneva composes virtual collages from fragments of physical environments, choreographing the viewer’s path through a guided, almost game-like navigation. Entering these spaces feels akin to entering a dream: past experiences are evoked but scrambled, recognisable structures are bent or broken, and narrative must be reassembled on the move. The work points to the tension between agency and control – between the apparent freedom of virtual wandering and the pre-defined routes encoded by the artist or the system. In Contingent Space, the self becomes a bridge between the physical and the virtual, yet that bridge is always selective: with every translation from one layer of reality to another, something is lost, skewed, or quietly removed from view.

This question of translation – from image to environment, from projection to material – is taken up explicitly in Float, presented here with three 3D-printed ceramic elements as a tangible actualisation of virtual experience. Developed in collaboration with Edo Garcia and Sari Sandberg, the work re-creates a day in Venice before and during acqua alta, holding together the city’s technological brilliance and its vulnerability to human-made climatic change. The ceramics act almost as archaeological shards from a future museum: fragile, provisional anchors that bring the distant scenario of a partially submerged city into the physical space of Hong Kong. Float becomes a quiet stage for reflection on the double-edged nature of innovation – how the same ingenuity that builds can also erode the very environments it inhabits.

At the back of the gallery, Minims gathers Vaneva’s concerns into a more intimate scale. Composed of many small video moments, it reads as a visual poem about the building blocks of perception. As minor events accumulate and overlay, they construct a larger yet still unstable structure, mirroring how reality arrives to us in layers: fleeting impressions that only later sediment into memory. Positioned near the works of the guest artists, Minims suggests a shared grammar of fragments, repetition and re-assembly across the exhibition.

As a non-solo, Echoes from Elsewhere deliberately opens Vaneva’s practice to dialogue. Yuko Fukuba Johnsson, Jinki Lau and Silvester Mok extend and echo her investigations into how images, objects and histories are processed, translated and re-formed. From Mok’s digitally modelled and printed ceramic mini-sculptures in Outer Coral, which imagine marine forms at once organic and computational, to Lau’s 88 Queen’s Road West, a layered ceramic relief built up through additive, almost pixel-like printing, material becomes a site where virtual thinking is given weight and texture. Their works explore how three-dimensional and multi-dimensional worlds can be reconstructed, compressed, or stretched through iterative making.

In parallel, Fukuba Johnsson’s series of works approaches memory as an image that grows alongside a life. Working with found objects and processes of deconstruction, she exposes the histories embedded in things: how they were handled, used, forgotten, and reconfigured. Each piece is less a static sculpture than a record of transformation, attentive to the labour and time that matter carries within it.

Together, these three local guest artists layer their approaches one over another, expanding Vaneva’s concerns from the screen into the ceramic, the archival and the everyday. The exhibition as a whole proposes a space where non-local and local practices co-exist not as a simple exchange, but as overlapping processes of re-making. Echoes from Elsewhere invites visitors to dwell in this layered field – to move between projections and objects, between distant cities and familiar streets, and to consider how our memories, environments and technologies continuously reshape one another.