Your Grief Belongs To You And Can Be So So Pretty – Exhibition Review

Your Grief Belongs To You, And It Can Be So So Pretty – Exhibition Review

Common depictions of grief can be rigid; however, creative collective RITUALVICE, seeks to move away from darkness and into lightness in the recent exhibition at Galleria Objets. 

“Your Grief Belongs To You, And It Can Be So So Pretty” brings together artists to explore this process and highlight a certain softness that can be found here.

Entering the exhibition space in Galleria Objets, the viewer is met by the web of hair produced by artist Kostruk. The installation acts not only as a portal into the artist’s personal narrative but also visually ties the different works together. For Kostruk,

The beauty of a group show is the dialogue that begins to take shape within the space itself.

Looking beyond the grief of losing a loved one, the exhibition invites artists to consider other forms of mourning: the loss of a past self, the ache of nostalgia, or even the grief for places and lives we’ve left behind. In doing so, the exhibition opens up grief as a living, multifaceted process, one that transforms, flexes, and ripples.

Kostruk, 2025

Curator and participating artist, Mercurial Pearl, invites the artists to explore their own narratives of this shared experience, holding space for each artist to encounter it differently. She notes: 

The title of the exhibition is designed to provoke. To remind the viewer that their grief belongs to them. And that if you query it, you can begin to notice there is still so much light that spins around the funnel of death and loss.

For Pearl, this body of work is not purely curatorial; tackling her own personal interactions with grief, she embarks on this journey with other artists to explore the currents of it. 

The exhibition does not deny the darkness inherent in loss, but explores what lies beyond it. In turn, the exhibition displays the softer hues that appear as grief changes shape.

I was curious about exploring its nuances. The grief that feels foreign, long ago or abstracted. The grief that was once heavy and dark but has matured, evolved, perhaps softened.

Mercurial Pearl, 2025

Each artist’s contribution becomes a conversation in this emotional landscape. Through varied artistic journeys, each artist employs a different voice from sculpture, nail art, collage and immersive installation. Together, they map how grief moves and ripples through life. 

Nail artist Giulia Oldani, embarks on this passage by employing an unexpected medium. The Hands That Remember narrates how grief shapes itself in different stages of life. Oldani utilises the motif of hands as a symbol of the passing of time. 

Working on these pieces made me explore grief in a completely new way, giving it power and allowing this feeling to be transformed into something beautiful.

Giulia Oldani, The Hands That Remember, 2025

The works of Sebawali Sio, one of the exhibiting artists, draw upon movement and metaphors of water. Through fluid forms and organic patterning, Sio channels the rhythmic push and pull of emotion, the tidal qualities of loss and renewal. Sio recalls;

My work orbits water, femininity, nature, and, central to this exhibition, “grief”. I treat water as subject and metaphor: memory, emotion, repair. Organic patterning (ripples, branching flows, slime-mould networks) helps me visualise interdependence.

Sebawali Sio, Sitting Lady, 2023

Sebawali Sio, Up Jumps The Boogie, 2022

Looking at the flux between tenderness and endurance, Sio finds the softer side of grief. She likens the journey to the process of water cleansing. 

As tidal ebb and return, where loss and love co-exist. The “softer side” is the labour of care: the cup that holds, the basin that cleanses. 

Central to this exhibition is the ethos that grief is not a static state, but a movement, found in the motion of Sio’s work. 

The Winds II displays the undulating and changing currents of movement in grief like wind moving through ribboned surfaces.

It speaks to grief as breath: the subtle turbulence, the exhale, the space that lets feeling pass through without breaking us.

Kostruk, Portal of grief, the end of childhood, 2025

The collective practice of RITUALVICE provides guidance through the times of darkness, bringing the public along on this journey. Allowing the visitor to bear witness to the currents of loss to initiate the process of healing.