The Practice of Attention
Group Show, The Hoxton, Paris, 2026
Curated by Maia Victoria Rose
The Practice of Attention is Maia Victoria Rose’s debut curatorial project, developed in collaboration with The Hoxton, Paris. Bringing together eleven international artists across painting, photography, drawing and mixed media, the exhibition began with a question: in a culture increasingly organised around immediacy, consumption and an excess of images, what does it mean to truly look?
Rose developed the exhibition as a response to the increasingly mediated ways in which art is encountered and understood. Rather than asking the works to illustrate a predetermined theme, her curatorial process began with the artists themselves. Practices were researched and selected for the particular forms of attention they revealed, whether directed towards memory, emotion, space or the everyday. The absence of a shared medium, nationality or aesthetic became central to the exhibition. What connected the works was not how they looked, but the sustained act of looking from which they emerged.
From this research, Rose developed the curatorial framework, selected the participating artists and works, established relationships between otherwise distinct practices, and shaped the exhibition's spatial and conceptual progression. Presented throughout the underground corridors of The Hoxton, the architecture became part of the curatorial proposition. A space ordinarily experienced in passage was transformed into one that asked visitors to stop, linger and notice. Placement, proximity and juxtaposition were used to create conversations between works without prescribing how those relationships should be interpreted.
Rose led the project from curatorial research and artist liaison through artwork selection, exhibition planning and the development of the accompanying essay, A Homage to Looking. Her approach resisted the idea that an exhibition should instruct its audience what to see. Instead, The Practice of Attention was conceived as an environment in which the viewer’s own response could become part of the exhibition, restoring looking as something instinctive, personal and capable of preceding explanation.
The project established a curatorial methodology centred on research, selection and spatial relationships, but equally on trust in the encounter between artwork and viewer. Rather than using curation to authenticate taste, Rose approaches it as a means of creating the conditions in which attention can occur.
Curator: Maia Victoria Rose
Exhibition Essay: A Homage to Looking, written by Selene Loaiza
Space: The Hoxton Hotel, Paris
Artists: Cassandra Malmberg, Emma Nicole Berry, Leevar Spies, Emmanuel Mousset + Woorim Moon (artist duo 75070), Henri Ekman, Gabriel Cole, Angus White, Ulrik Schjerbeck, Camille Oudinot and Stéphanie Merli
Exhibition Essay: A Homage to Looking
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.