Rose Jail • Tache Gallery • London, UK • 2026
Group Show
Rose Jail examines modern romance in the age of dating apps and algorithms that commodify love and reduce us to our most conventionally appealing qualities.
The exhibition brings together artists who survey modern romance from various angles, taking inspiration from the show’s title and drawing from their own experiences navigating today’s romantic landscape. Through painting, sculpture, installation and moving image, the artists address how technology has reshaped our senses of human connection and selfhood, make revisionist reflections on traditional relationship structures and compare today’s algorithmic matchmaking systems to methods of prophesying love in the Middle Ages.
Rules of Encounter (2026, 100 x 140cm, Wallpaper, carved wood, acrylic, varnish) is a new installation, composed of a wallpaper and its frame, that approaches the algorithmic search for love as a contemporary form of divination.
The printed image is structured as a divinatory diagram, depicting tools historically used in the Middle Ages for love prophecy—mistletoe, a scrying sphere, and a polished mirror. These liminal devices once functioned as oracles, mediating desire, fate, and projection; here, they echo the logic of today’s dating interfaces and algorithmic matching systems.
The surface of the wallpaper becomes a threshold, reflecting how romance today is experienced through interfaces that organise proximity, distance, and desire in the age of the algorithm.
In Rose Jail, at Tache Gallery, the works exhibited question how we develop intimacy in a digital world that both draws us together and pushes us further apart.
Artists: Naomi Boiko-Stapleton - Nell Castor - Louise Gaubert - Laura Kazaroff - Eldar Krainer - Thomas Lake - Grace Mcnerney - Arty Nicharee - Léa Porré - Estelle Simpson - Nicole Wallbridge Bourmistrova - Yichun Yao