Soup is delighted to present the gallery’s twentieth exhibition, Ted Le Swer’s solo exhibition Comrades, Sleep Faster!. Le Swer (b. 1995, Nottingham) is a British artist living and working in London. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2017. Soup has previously included work by Le Swer in group exhibitions All The Small Things II (2025) and Welcome To The Island Of Misfit Toys. Comrades, Sleep Faster! borrows its title from Ilf and Petrov’s 1920s Soviet satirical text on speed, efficiency, and the promise of a radiant future. The exhibition serves...
Soup is delighted to present the gallery’s twentieth exhibition, Ted Le Swer’s solo exhibition Comrades, Sleep Faster!. Le Swer (b. 1995, Nottingham) is a British artist living and working in London. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2017. Soup has previously included work by Le Swer in group exhibitions All The Small Things II (2025) and Welcome To The Island Of Misfit Toys.
Comrades, Sleep Faster! borrows its title from Ilf and Petrov’s 1920s Soviet satirical text on speed, efficiency, and the promise of a radiant future. The exhibition serves as a quiet call to action, a rehearsal to inhabit the latent traces images leave behind, through which time is accumulated, measured and performed.
The labour of Friesian cows, weather surveillance cameras and Disney’s Bambi (1942) become comrades, performing alternative metrics of time through folklore, infrastructure and cinema. Be it cows sensing and responding to atmospheric changes; weather cameras scanning and live-streaming their horizon line for meteorologists and grassroots communities alike; or Bambi constructing an ecological epoch against which contemporary ecology is measured.
Throughout the exhibition, these labours are observed, recorded and displayed, captured by customised time-based technologies, homemade pinhole cameras, 16mm analog film stock and VFX post-production workflows. Labour becomes a repository of memory and time to be exposed, sequenced and performed within. Le Swer looks to the image-sequence as a site where the aperture of time operates, as the latency between frames produces subtle inflection points of space or duration. Time accumulates here not through forward momentum, but through the gaps and pauses that structure perception. Rather than accelerating towards an imagined future, this sequencing of frames suspends its arrival as an alternative production of the present. Gently leaked and ghosted into the exhibition.
