Unbinding Bodies and Systems at FRAMELESS: A Collaboration of Movement, Memory, and Digital Art

On a breezy London evening, as the city cooled after a heatwave, FRAMELESS welcomed visitors to a unique celebration of digital and dance artistry. This collaborative partnership between FRAMELESS and the Royal College of Art (RCA) offered a powerful exploration of movement as a language of identity, resistance, and joy. It was kick-started as a one-night-only event on 2 July, marking the opening of RCA’s Festival of Communication and showcasing sixteen works by graduating students from the RCA’s Digital Direction MA in the exhibition titled Systems Unbound. Among these talented emerging artists, three works of the rising graduate artists have been selected for the summer-long residency Bodies Unbound, on view at FRAMELESS through September.

From Creative Passage to Blank Canvas

The journey began with Creative Passage — a tunnel of coloured lights and mirrored surfaces, where reflections and pulsing DJ beats set a playful, immersive tone. Descending the escalator, visitors glimpsed themselves multiplied and kaleidoscopically transformed, foreshadowing the exhibition’s themes of identity and change.

At the heart of FRAMELESS, the Blank Canvas gallery was converted into a triptych digital canvas, drawing nearly 100 standing audience members into a vibrant dialogue among the sixteen digital narratives. In a venue famed for its immersive projections of drawings from art history, including those by Monet, Van Gogh, and Dalí etc., Systems Unbound offered a striking contrast: digital works that make contemporary statements.

Shared Concepts: Systems, Memory, and Resistance

At its core, Systems Unbound explored what it means to live and move within systems never built for care. The curatorial notes highlighted a world where women’s rights are stripped and ecological collapse is background noise. Rather than escaping these realities, the artists trace, question, and rework their boundaries through systems, memory, and the body.

Memory, Place, and Collective Trauma

Several works revisited overlooked or silenced histories. All the Beautiful People Are Gone (Chihayamisha Maseka) revisited Zambia’s Zamrock scene, while Mali (Saumya Shukla) wove personal amnesia with collective trauma from the Union Carbide disaster, metaphorically using a “memory garden” where plants were living witnesses and storytellers.

Drifting Within Boundaries (Jing Wang) explored the emotional wounds of displaced women in rural China, co-created with the Ah-Le community. Cycles (Ventcislava Nekova) and Tunnel Mirage (Lejin Fan) respectively resisted patriarchal power dynamics embedded in family daily life and re-imagined fragmented identities and presence through the constant relocation in the tunnel of life.

Image: Ventcislava Nekova's Cycles

Ecology and the More-Than-Human

Other artists interrogated our relationship with technology and the environment. Myco Mind Island (Xi Xu & Ziqiao Yi) simulated fungal communication, critiquing human-centric design and advocating for multispecies coexistence. Fading Blue (Kexin Jin) explored the potential of sound as a narrative core and entity.

Image: Sai-Mai's The Pulse Within | Credit: FRAMELESS

The Body as Archive and Weapon

Coincidentally, the three works selected for the Bodies Unbound residency touch upon the idea of the resistant body as archive and weapon.

The Pulse Within (Sai Ma): An evocative tribute to Shanghai’s underground voguing community. Blending motion capture, memoir, and movement/dance as resistance and survival, the work portrayed Vogue dance becoming a universal language of freedom and hope, especially for China’s LGBTQ+ community.

Rebuild Ruins – Escape (Yuchen Li): A haunting, dreamlike video work where digital choreography became a search for freedom, with the body moving through digital landscapes of restriction in pursuit of liberation.

Image: Alexis Obue and Kashish Gakhar's The Veil  | Credit: FRAMELESS

The Veil (Alexis Obue and Kashish Gakhar) delved into embodied patriarchal shame, blending Heels dance with Indian Kathak to navigate the tension between concealment and exposure. Here, movement became a negotiation with inherited and imposed boundaries.

These works, united by a belief in the body as a vessel for power, pride, and possibility, invite audiences to witness movement as a form of personal and collective storytelling.

 Image: Yuchen Li's Rebuild Ruins – Escape | Credit: FRAMELESS

A Night of Contrasts and Continuities

Moving from the Blank Canvas gallery to FRAMELESS’s four permanent immersive spaces heightened the sense of dialogue between past and present through digital execution. Whilst the artistic tools and stories may change, the urge to create, question, and connect remains timeless.

Systems Unbound is more than an exhibition; it’s an invitation to move, remember, and imagine together. As visitors passed through the Creative Passage into the night, the experience lingered as a reminder that, collectively, we can create a world with a little more care.