Residual: What Never Stays
Residual: What Never Stays
LILIS LAB presents Residual: What Never Stays, a group exhibition exploring what lies behind what we see. Through traces, materials, structures, and relationships, the exhibition considers what remains, what changes, and what disappears as things take shape.
Every act of making is shaped by things that may never become part of what we finally see. Materials are used and discarded, structures appear and disappear, processes leave traces, and relationships form around the things we create, use, and encounter.
Residual: What Never Stays turns attention to these often overlooked presences. Rather than treating the residual simply as waste or something left behind, the exhibition considers it as evidence of what has taken place: a material trace, a temporary structure, a memory, a gesture, a relationship, or a process of change.
Curated by Jiayin Lu, the exhibition brings together artists and designers from different countries and backgrounds, each approaching the idea of the residual through their own experiences, materials, and ways of working. Together, the works consider how things are formed, altered, remembered, and eventually disappear.
Presented by LILIS LAB at Calder Contemporary, Residual asks us to pay closer attention not only to what remains, but to everything that had to exist for something else to take shape.
What disappears so that something else can stay?
LILIS LAB
LILIS LAB is a London-based creative studio working across contemporary art, design, and digital fabrication.
We support artists, designers, brands, and creative practitioners in bringing ideas into physical form through design, prototyping, production, and visual presentation. Alongside our fabrication practice, we curate exhibitions and collaborative projects exploring the intersections of art, design, making, and technology.
Through exhibitions, Open Calls, artist support, and our Artist Platform, we create opportunities for collaboration, experimentation, and public engagement while building an international network of creative practitioners.
Curatorial Statement
Residual: What Never Stays begins with what is left after something has already changed.
A trace can be physical, but not always. It can sit in a material, remain in an image, stay with the body, or return through memory. Sometimes it is obvious. Sometimes it only becomes visible once the thing that produced it is no longer there.
The works in the exhibition move between photography, moving image, sculpture, textiles, ceramics and installation, but many of them share an interest in unstable states. Bodies merge with natural forms. Images hold onto absent objects. Materials stretch, collapse, harden, fray or exceed the structures meant to contain them. Processes that are usually hidden or removed are allowed to remain visible.
There is also a recurring question of what it means to preserve something. A photograph can keep an image while changing the object it refers to. A surface can carry the memory of pressure or touch. A support structure can outlast the form it was made to sustain. Something can disappear and still continue to shape what comes after.
Rather than treating residue as the final remainder of a process, the exhibition considers it as something active. What is left behind can shift, gather new meanings, or become the starting point for another form.
Residual sits in that uncertain space: between presence and absence, completion and change, holding on and letting go.
What disappears so that something else can stay?
Exhibition Details
Exhibition: Residual: What Never Stays
Presented by: LILIS LAB
Programme: London Design Festival 2026 Official Partner Programme
Venue: Calder Contemporary, London
Dates: 19–21 September 2026
Exhibition Details
Exhibition: Residual: What Never Stays
Presented by: LILIS LAB
Programme: London Design Festival 2026 Official Partner Programme
Venue: Calder Contemporary, London
Dates: 19–21 September 2026
Artist list:
Wan’er Li
Jill Yao
Wei Lu
Jiabao Zhao
Tatiana Fetisova
Dimension Ceramic - Di Meng
Jeff Wang & Siena Wang
Manisha Puri
Yun Wen
Yu Yu (Spencer)
Ziyo Li
Xinyue Hope Shen
Shaw Liu
Bingxu Qiang
Jiayin Lu
Tongxin Lu
Wenqi Pan
Curator and team list
Curator: Jiayin Lu
Presented by LILIS LAB
