13 June – 5 July 2026
92 Webster Road, London, UK

In The Voyage, Adrián Balseca draws on a snippet of history connecting London to his decade-long research on rubber: In 1876, rubber tree seeds from Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, were taken by British botanist Henry Wickham to Kew Gardens. From Kew, seedlings were propagated and subsequently transported to British colonies across Asia, a region which now leads global natural rubber production.

Approached by the artist as an early case of biopiracy long before the contemporary term was coined or facts perceived as such, this episode becomes the starting point for an exploration that unties linear narrative, entangles historical associations, and plays with words to highlight how travels of various natures play parts in both the construction and the reflection of colonial legacy across the world.



At 92 Webster Road, Balseca’s interest in the specificity of places goes so far as to draw on its particular spatial conditions. Inside the cube, natural life is reduced to an object, and the cube itself turned into a display case that gestures to an ethnographical practice: a space for what has been removed from its original setting, displaced, controlled, and eventually rendered untouchable. The contemplation from a detached gaze suggests a route to the colonial-rooted approach that sees land as a stockpile of resources to be extracted. The plant, on display and unreachable, is tied against a pole by a buckle tree strap, to guide its growth in a controlled direction – a visual manifestation of the notion of development, as well as of forces at play.

From farther away, what one sees of the installation is instead a playful allusion to the journeys that extractivism and globalised markets entail. The external surface of the cube is treated by the artist as a shipping crate. Plastic envelopes that usually enclose invoices of small parcels hold paper bundles compiled by the artist to make for the “documentation enclosed” with the plant’s travelling: archival images, vintage documents and postcards, new photographs, fragments of letters and transcriptions, and other ephemera. In a deliberate practice of resourcing and prompting further travels, the creation of these bundles relied on online sourcing from Amazon and ebay, as well as the efficient delivery services of Britain’s Royal Mail – Balseca’s work thrives on irony.

The artist, who often draws attention to branding strategies that serve global trading, is equally attentive here to how the naming of plants travels and transforms perception, imprinting origins as well as histories of control over territories. Browsing through these fragments, one encounters Pará Rubber growing in Sri-Lanka and documented in French; rubber trees in the Malay Peninsula differentiated by the inclusion of “Wild” in their naming; and the picture of a rubber tree plantation of unclear location reported on a postcard made in Japan. One postcard features a tree labelled "Havea braziliensis, Planted 1879" in Singapore. Another, captioned "Tapping Rubber, Malay Peninsula" and left undated, reads: "...the photo itself and the words at the bottom here tell practically all about this photo except that the peninsula is covered with these trees and the majority of the world's rubber comes from these…"

In the mixing of old materials and new assemblages of earlier research, these fragments trace how, from rubber’s late nineteenth-century London stop, its stories acquired new chapters and new identity associations as rubber itself travelled through South and Southeast Asia. The same attention to naming leads Balseca in the opposite direction: the India Rubber Plant – Ficus elastica 'Robusta' – is one of London's most popular houseplants, its name quietly announcing an Asian origin that the city has long since domesticated into familiarity. Ficus elastica or Havea braziliensis, the naming system that categorises them is alone a piece of evidence of how knowledge also gets colonised and controlled.

Just like seeds and plants, names and stories travel, mix, and entangle. By resorting to a collation of fragments assembled inventively and playfully, rather than any linear argument, Balseca crafts a visual essay that leaves room for speculation. He gently counters historical narratives of modernisation while keeping the entanglements of coloniality and their reverberations. These remain in the present, and in view – even if requiring a conscious effort to peer through the cracks in history and see what else can be glimpsed amidst less documented accounts.

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Adrián Balseca (b. 1989, Quito) maintains a research-based practice working across moving image, photography, and installation. Allying aesthetic refinement and conceptual rigour, his work carries an ironic tone that lends a layered subtlety to his political commentary. His work is equally attuned to how narratives of development and modernisation always carry, on their flipside, an environmental and human cost.

Central to Balseca's practice is the way his seminal works, often films, serve as generative cores from which satellite narratives and new formal investigations ramify outward – The Voyage being the latest to unfold from the 16mm video piece The Skin of Labour (2016). This process of return and reiteration works on two levels: shedding light on colonial histories with growing specificity each time and in each new location, while simultaneously opening imaginative possibilities – artistic responses that exceed documentation and become acts of restitution in their own right, in the sense that they constitute revisions of history.


On View Simultaneously
Reflecting the same plurality that defines the development of his artworks, throughout the summer of 2026 Balseca's work can be encountered independently and simultaneously in three European cities: in London, at 92 Webster Road, alongside separate presentations in Dundee, Scotland, and Düren, Germany.

In Dundee, marking his debut in Scotland, Balseca undertook a month-long residency at Dundee Contemporary Arts, developing works that extend his rubber research by drawing a conceptual link between Scotland and the Amazon through the history of Michelin Enterprises, which manufactured in Dundee for over fifty years. In Düren, at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, his enquiry into rubber extraction meets with another major research strand of his, on the uses of obsidian, and he intersects both to create a new installation that expands on the relationships between human and planetary health. Dundee Contemporary Arts’ exhibition, In the Forest Ruins, which features the 2016 film The Skin of Labour amidst new works, runs until 2 August 2026. At Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren, A Chiasmatic Body runs from 13 June until 6 September 2026.

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Adrián Balseca: The Voyage
13 June – 5 July 2026

92 Webster Road
London SE16 4DF

Credits
Curator: Cecilia Vilela
Host: Ron Henocq
Production: Helena Abud, Paloma Passetto de Souza, Bia Pennino and Asher Herr
Photography: Francis Ware

Generously supported by RHFA

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