Time and value are at once fleeting, elastic, distracting, and inevitable, and form the central subject of Ryan Gander’s latest exhibition, I’ve Fallen Foul of My Desire. Referencing humanity’s ongoing obsession with the accumulation of “stuff”, the exhibition brings together new and recent sculptures, animatronics, and installations, exploring how we perceive, distort, and inhabit time and how imagination can transform our relationship to it.
“The artworks remind us that we are in charge of our own destiny, our agency and our time—factors that are more important than the things that are dictated to us by society and tradition,” Gander notes. “The power is in your imagination, and you have the power to change your perception.”
At the centre of the exhibition is The Storyteller: The sense that you are a part of a flow of a thing (2025), in which an animatronic harvest mouse emerges from a hole in the wall to deliver a philosophical monologue in the voice of the artist’s daughter. Reflecting on identity, commodification, and possibility, the mouse becomes the conscience of the exhibition, whispering to visitors about uncertainty and that imagination needs to be seen as an essential resource.
Elsewhere, the perception of time and value falters and fragments. In the courtyard, a monumental black sphere asks Why am I so distracted? (2025), perhaps invisible to passersby scrolling on their phones. In Everything is Titled, a mosquito twitches endlessly on a cake stand, suspended in the moment between life and death. Questions of value and exchange are addressed in Equivalent Economies and Equivalent Means (2018), a vending machine that once dispensed either a bundle of €100 notes totalling €10,000 or rounded stones collected by Gander and his children from a beach near their home. Presented with equal price tags until anti-money-laundering laws intervened, the work undermines systems of measurement and worth, asking how time, value, and memory become entangled. The Graphite-cast Bit Part Player (Balthazar, Merchant of Venice; Act 3, Scene 4) (2020) leans against the gallery walls, recalling the building’s former life as a drama school, where young actors waited endlessly in the wings for their fleeting lines.
The balcony becomes a quiet reflective space where Chronos Kairos, 01.01 (2025), a doubled off-set wall clock, glitches between two realities. Nearby, two stray cats, Charlie (2020) and Smoky (2020), are found asleep on the floor—squatters finding their way into the institution, oblivious to what’s going on around them and the purpose of the surrounding visitors.
Taken together, these works create an exhibition that invites visitors to reflect on distraction, mortality, value, and above all, the imaginative potential of time itself.
| Duration | 15 October 2025 - 18 January 2026 |
| Times | Wed-Fri 9am-3.30pm Sat-Sun 9am-4.30pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Camden Arts Projects |
| Address | 176 Prince of Wales Road, London, NW5 3PT |
| Contact | / manager@camdenartsprojects.com / www.camdenartsprojects.com/ |