Racheal Crowther: Liquid Trust

Attending the opening of Liquid Trust, Racheal Crowther’s new commission for Chisenhale Gallery, felt like returning to a familiar social rhythm as much as visiting an exhibition. Outside, before entering, I met an old friend I hadn’t seen in years, and almost immediately we began to talk about a past East London art scene: crowded private views; Sunday public programmes at Matt’s Gallery in Mile End; artists and students moving between studios, schools, and project spaces. A generation later, much of that art ecology has dispersed under the pressures of precarity and rising rents. Since I moved south of the river, I have found myself making the journey east less often than before. Returning to Chisenhale reminded me how art galleries and organisations in this area of London continue to sustain not just artistic work, but also the social worlds that gather around it.

Under its (relatively) new director Edward Gillman, formerly of Auto Italia, another East End art organisation, Chisenhale is continuing its long-standing commitment to commissioning ambitious new work from artists at formative stages in their careers. Crowther, a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts, is an appropriate beneficiary of this institutional lineage: a young, forward-thinking artist whose practice is positioned at the intersection of material experimentation and urgent political inquiry. Liquid Trust is complex both conceptually and materially, a sensorial experience positioned as institutional critique. It is an immersive installation that articulates an argument around biopower: a concept which encompasses both the explicit and implicit systems through which both care and control are exercised over a population. 

Upon entering the gallery, I encountered a mobile medical unit once used by the British Armed Forces: a transportable military clinic, reinstalled in the space as an architectural sculpture. In order to engage with the work, I needed to enter the unit, moving through its narrow, functional interior, and exploring what felt like an abandoned infrastructure of treatment. The unit embodies the visual language of emergency and command, which is metallic, modular, and somewhat severe. It also feels aged and obsolete, as though its operational life has ended and what remains is a kind of ideological residue. Removed from its military context and relocated into the art gallery, the structure becomes a kind of relic or folly, which counterintuitively makes legible its latent violence.

Crowther’s artistic argument is deceptively simple: by recontextualising a military-medical apparatus within the exhibition space, she exposes the conflicting boundary between care and control. Hospitals, military systems, and bureaucratic institutions all present themselves as protective structures, but they are equally mechanisms for classification, regulation, and discipline. This idea distinctly resonates with Michel Foucault’s concept of a ‘disciplinary society’, particularly his theorisation of biopower or the ways control systems govern bodies not only through force, but through care, optimisation, and surveillance. What I found compelling is that Crowther insists on embodied experience. In other words, biopower is not necessarily theorised, but instead, it is felt and sensed through the body in various ways.

One example of this effect is the work’s olfactory dimension. A strange, diffuse smell, which is at once intimate and difficult to identify, permeates the gallery, entering through the nostrils into the body. I couldn’t immediately place the scent, which made it all the more disorienting. According to the gallery text, it incorporates substances associated with the production of powdered milk, alongside chemical compounds which recall the smell of newborns: substances linked to nourishment, dependency, early attachment, and social bonding. These associations complicate the presence of the military installation. If the unit displays institutional authority, the smell stages biological intimacy, invoking maternal care, survival, and vulnerability. Yet these too are forms of control, where attachment and regulation become difficult to disentangle.

The gallery’s walls, painted in a vibrant Baker-Miller pink (a colour historically used in prisons and psychiatric institutions under the belief that it could reduce aggression), extend the sensory politics of the exhibition. Colour and smell function here as behavioural technologies, aestheticised but not neutral. Against the harshness of the military unit, these softer sensory elements become antonymically charged. They produce an atmosphere of comfort in a structure built for discipline and emergency response, creating, at the centre of the work, a tangible contradiction.

Crowther’s installation situates itself within a broader lineage of contemporary artists engaging with the practices and politics of surveillance and institutional power: Julia Scher’s seductive security environments and ‘pink camouflage’, Trevor Paglen’s exposure of mass surveillance systems and state secrecy, Harun Farocki’s analyses of how technology and capitalism shape and regulate human perception, and Tania Bruguera’s participatory structures of political restriction and state authority. Crowther extends this conversation by locating power within political systems and institutional frameworks as well as within the body itself and the realm of sensation.

What stayed with me after leaving was less the work’s critique of institutional power than the tension Crowther sustains between structures of force and atmospheres of care. The military unit itself is decisively unattractive: narrow, metallic, functional, marked by the aesthetics of command rather than comfort. There is nothing seductive about it. But against this harsh architecture, Crowther stages the nourishing flavour of powdered milk, the comforting scent of chemical traces of social bonding, and the calming promise of Baker-Miller pink. These softer sensory interventions do not neutralise the severity of the structure; they intensify it by contradiction. Moving through the installation, I felt caught between opposing bodily registers: somehow soothed and comforted, but at the same time, a bit unsettled and alert. That tension is where the work becomes most compelling. Care is not necessarily innocent, and control is not solely violent. 

As the opening unfolded, and the gallery filled up with people, the artist’s argument felt sharpened by the setting itself. The social life of the gallery and the work’s politics of control and authority seemed, for a moment, to run in parallel: both structured by forms of gathering, support, and institutional framing. Chisenhale Gallery remains one of the few spaces in London’s East End committed to sustaining experimental practices at this scale, and Liquid Trust is a reminder of how the power contemporary art holds, inviting an awareness of systems both intangible and material into the body as something inhaled, inhabited, and carried back out into the city.

Dr Paula Zambrano, CAS Curator of Programmes