Lead Curator and Scenographer, Collective Care, London College of Fashion, UAL, 2024

As Lead Curator of Collective Care, Dr Leila Nassereldein worked closely with Eve Lin to develop A Mother’s Guide to Love from a single-channel moving-image work into an immersive environment. The film unfolds within a digitally constructed game world populated by virtual garments, symbolic objects and shifting landscapes. Drawing on Buddhist visual culture and the ritual burning of paper offerings, Lin uses this speculative environment to explore ‘quiet love’: the gestures, routines and practical acts through which their Taiwanese mother expressed affection beyond speech.

Nassereldein encouraged Lin to reconfigure the work across three screens, each revealing a different viewpoint within the same virtual world. This displaced the authority of a single camera and opened the film into a field of simultaneous but incomplete perspectives. Events unfolded in parallel; details appeared at the margins of attention; one image revised the meaning of another. Audiences had to look across and between the screens, assembling the work through comparison, movement and time.

The form echoed the relationship at its centre. Maternal care did not appear as a singular declaration, but through dispersed signs whose meaning accumulated gradually. The triptych made this indirectness perceptible: no one image contained the whole.

Beanbags printed with imagery from the film carried its visual language onto the gallery floor. Their placement lowered the body, interrupted the upright conventions of spectatorship and established several positions from which the digital environment could be encountered. Visitors were invited to recline and remain, allowing attention to move more slowly across the work.

Jasmine scent, the film score and an accompanying artist essay extended this atmosphere beyond the visual. Looking, listening and reading became part of one spatial composition. Through these curatorial decisions, care was not only represented within the film; it became the organising principle of the room -partial, atmospheric and sustained through time.