Brexciya

Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban, Emmanuel Ewuni, Kumbirai Makumbe

Curated by Rudi Minto de Wijs

Saturday 1st November - Sunday 21st December 2025

Quench Gallery presents Brexciya, an exhibition that reimagines narratives of belonging, resistance, and rebirth through the works of Kumbirai Makumbe, Emmanuel Awuni, and the artist duo Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban. Inspired by Drexciya, a speculative mythology created by Detroit-based electronic duo Drexciya, Brexciya explores themes of migration, identity, and transformation, while situating these ideas within the socio-political context of Margate and Thanet, a region pivotal to Brexit.

The exhibition bridges two significant frameworks, one fiction and one historical: Drexciya’s narrative retelling of enslaved mothers who were cast overboard after being captured and Brexit. Dreciya rewrites the deaths of enslaved mothers, instead saying that they thrived in an underwater utopia. This exhibition positions all immigrants as new world survivors.The  realities of Brexit, which reshaped the UK’s relationship with Europe is also present. Brexciya reframes immigrant tales, focusing on resilience, growth, and hope rather than loss or displacement.

Through sculpture, installation, and immersive environments, the participating artists interrogate the complex, nonlinear experiences of migration, hybridity, and identity. 

From Makumbe’s speculative explorations of Black queer diaspora to Awuni’s liberatory reimaginings of cultural objects, and Kardashian & Mhach Durban’s domestic reconstructions, Brexciya offers an expansive, hopeful vision of belonging and resistance. Together, these works invite audiences to reflect on histories of removal and conceptualise them as stories of emergence, renewal, and solidarity.

Brexciya is a reimagining of belonging, resistance, and rebirth, drawing conceptual inspiration from Drexciya, a speculative mythology created by Detroit-based electronic duo Drexciya. The exhibition bridges narratives of migration, hybridity, and transformation, linking the Drexciyan mythos with the socio-political realities of Brexit.

Set against the backdrop of Margate and Thanet, a region central to the Brexit referendum, Brexciya reframes immigrant tales as stories of growth, resilience, and hope. The exhibition challenges traditional narratives of loss and removal, instead celebrating emergence, rebirth, and the possibility of new belonging.

Through your works, the exhibition will invite audiences to engage with these ideas, offering an expansive, hopeful vision of resistance and solidarity.

Curated by Rudi Minto de Wijs

Kumbirai Mukumbe 

Kumbirai Makumbe is a Zimbabwean artist based in London whose artistic practice predominantly centers on sculpture, complemented by imagery, video, and audio-visual digital installations.

Their recent work explores themes of self-narrativization, softness, reconciliation, and translocational belonging, with a particular focus on contributing to the development of a Black ‘doll’ (transfemme) gaze.

Through the medium of fabulation, their research investigates Intertopia—a liminal space situated in the throat of wormholes. Intertopia serves as a framework in which Makumbe uses quantum physics as a metaphor to express the complex, nonlinear spatiotemporal experiences of the Black queer diaspora. This concept draws from the cosmologies, spiritual beliefs, and rituals of the Shona people in Zimbabwe, weaving them together with speculative interstellar travel, transness, and metamorphosis.

Guided by the conceptualization of Blackness not as a matter of "what" but rather of "where" and "when," Makumbe employs traversal and portals as recurring motifs in their practice. By positioning themselves as an anatopism, they frame wanderlust as an act of embodied faith, a testament to the existence of something external that must be reached.

Recurring motifs in their practice include the manipulated body, traversal, and portals. In their sculptural work, Makumbe delights in obfuscating and manipulating elements of the human form, crafting a visual language that balances revelation and concealment.

Emmanuel Awuni 

Ghanaian artist Emmanuel Awuni mobilises diasporic traditions of oral history, hip-hop, jazz and Afrobeats to question established systems of power. As analytical vehicles for cultural deconstruction and reconfiguration, his practice draws comparisons between the mechanisms that underlie systems of incarceration and disempowerment, and those that support our cultural institutions, likening the encyclopaedic museum to a zoo of non-western cultures in cages. While music is at the core of his work, Awuni describes any repressed expression, no matter the medium, as ‘singing’ against the bars of oppression. Within the context of museology and its cultural biases, he reconfigures cast busts and found objects in blue packing foam bases, naming their spiritual potential and attending to them with ceremonial tenderness. Presenting his largest work to date on the upper level of the gallery, Awuni awakens and manifests the transformation of latent object to metaphysical being, inviting his viewers to bear witness to the act of emergence and liberation. Across all three floors of the gallery space, Awuni’s paintings hold space for free abstraction, dictated by breath and intuition. Recent works were completed during a residency at the The Roberts Institute of Art in Scotland, where Awuni was particularly inspired by the rural landscape around Cortachy and the River South Esk. His gestural compositions meditate on nonviolent resistance and freedom reimagined, echoing the river and its rhythms.

Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban

Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban (both b. 2000) are a British-Asian artist duo based in London. Their collaborative practice is founded upon an open & ongoing dialogue examining their shared experience of being raised in London by Indian mothers. Stories, food, clothes & objects passed from person to person, across houses, hands & borders, find a home in their work. The feminine diaspora & its link to world building is something the duo dissect, creating environments that reference the domestic & acknowledge but alter the gallery space & its atmosphere. A recurring question raised by their practice remains; what is sacred? Religious deities & pop icons of the modern world exist side by side, and the home-made & the glamorous encounter. Piracy, age, ownership, love & circumstance all take effect on the work’s materials resulting in an articulation of personal & marginalised histories.