Mara Projects is pleased to present Bitter Spring, a group exhibition held in a former whisky store at 17B Kingsland Road, Shoreditch.

The exhibition takes its premise from the ancient Greek word pharmakon, which means both poison and remedy. When Plato used it in the Phaedrus, his translators were forced to choose between the two meanings — and in choosing, missed the point. Some things have to be left untranslatable to not become something else entirely. The power of the pharmakon lies in its paradoxical nature: not balance or middle ground, but the same substance, gesture, or system capable of sustaining one person and subsuming another — without itself being the variable.

The former whisky store — a space built to house a substance that has always been both remedy and ruin — is not incidental to the exhibition’s argument. Like everything stored in anticipation, what is delivered is never quite what was promised. Bitter Spring opens at the precise moment before Spring, the season we load with the most expectation, arrives.

The works on view span painting, sculpture, kinetic installation, and moving image. Inés Cardó reimagines purple maize as oracle and offering, pairing the kernels with gold-painted teeth and drawing on pre-Columbian practices of communion with natural forces. Bora Baboçi’s paintings are residual images from a night journey through the Saharan desert — bodies and landscape as sites of exchange, always moving toward an obliterating light. Renid Tosuni’s work holds the memory of his great-grandmother — an alternative healer who mixed finely broken glass with herbs and wrapped it around the bodies of the sick. Felix Murphy’s paintings take their cue from the ancient temple of Asklepios at Epidauros, where the sick slept overnight in hope of dreaming their own cure. Ben Grosse-Johannboecke uses ornate metal fencing to seal three cabinets of new wood: whether the barrier withholds the cure or protects from harm, there is no way to know. Kairi Tokoro’s kinetic sculpture translates the encounter between wood, washi paper, and mineral pigment into sound — a rhythm that exists only in that contact between materials. Edoardo Rito invites you to go down the stairs.