There is a particular type of looking that does not announce itself. It does not perform. It simply stays. In a city like Paris, saturated with images that compete for our attention at every turn, what does it mean to truly look? Not to glance, validate or consume, but to actually look? We have become skilled at moving past things, at registering without receiving, at seeing without allowing ourselves to be changed by what we see. We have also been convinced that art requires permission. That taste must be acquired, codes mastered, references learned before we are entitled to respond. As if art had become a language spoken fluently only by those already inside the room.

The Practice of Attention begins from a refusal of that. As curator Maia Victoria Rose writes, “For a long time I moved through the world authenticating other people's visions, performing taste on behalf of institutions that never asked me what I actually saw. This show was my return to looking.” Rather than proposing new rules, the exhibition proposes the possibility of trusting our own gaze again.

The artists gathered here share no common style, medium or aesthetic. What connects them is a commitment to attention. In different ways, the works of Cassandra Malmberg, Emma Nicole Berry, Leevar Spies, Emmanuel Mousset, Woorim Moon, Henri Ekman, Gabriel Cole, Angus White, Ulrik Schjerbeck, Camille Oudinot and Stéphanie Merli emerge from a sustained engagement with the world, with memory, with emotion, with space, or with the everyday. Their practices remind us that attention is not passive. It is an act.

The exhibition unfolds through two reciprocal forms of attention: that of the artist and that of the viewer. The first gives rise to a body of work that could not have been made by anyone else. The second allows that presence to be encountered. As Susan Sontag observed, the excess of visual stimuli risks dulling our capacity to truly experience what we see. Interpretation often arrives before the encounter has had time to breathe. 

Presented throughout the underground corridors of the Hoxton, the exhibition invites visitors to linger where they would usually pass through. To notice what draws them in, and to trust it.

¹ Sontag, S. (2009). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1966)

Essay commissioned by Maia Victoria Rose and written by Selene Loaiza, a Paris-based writer with a background in art history and contemporary arts editorial. Edited by Maia Victoria Rose for The Practice of Attention, Hoxton Hotel Gallery, Paris, 2026.

To view the exhibition catalogue, you can click here.