Paper has always been collage’s first accomplice and its most persistent trap. It has carried our stories, our orders, our borders. It has archived our memories and bureaucracies alike. In the Western imagination, paper has been both the vessel of knowledge and the tool of control—thin yet heavy with ideology.
This exhibition, Phantom Tigers and Parallel Papers, takes paper back from that history. It reclaims it as a generative material—fragile but ungovernable, resistant to classification. Here, paper is not background but protagonist; not support, but substance. The artists gathered in this show—Susana Blasco, Andrea Burgay, Jack Felice, Alma Haser, Paul Henderson, Miko Hornborg, and Mark Wagner—approach collage not as a format but as a political and poetic gesture.
Their practices unfold across media, geographies, and sensibilities, yet they share a refusal of passivity. Paper is torn, layered, burned, folded, cut, and reassembled—not to conceal violence, but to make it visible. Each cut becomes a question: What histories are we made of? What fragments do we choose to keep? What happens when we rearrange them?
In their hands, collage becomes liberation—a way to reprogram matter, image, and memory. Susana Blasco geometrizes nostalgia, using paper like thread on a loom. Andrea Burgay performs alchemy with discarded ephemera, turning loss into fertile terrain. Jack Felice silences source images beneath monochrome strata, exposing the tension between presence and erasure. Alma Haser uses paper as an element that creates shadows and echoes on her own skin and body, playing with equivocation and trompe l'oeil. Paul Henderson composes surreal geographies where presences are defined by their absence. Miko Hornborg reconfigures the language of collage within digital culture, layering screenshots, scans, and physical cuts to expose the fragile boundary between originality and replication. Mark Wagner, slicing the icon of currency, dissects capitalism itself, reimagining value as a creative act.
Together, they embody what The Weird Show has always championed: collage as a mindset—an ethics of recomposition that resists homogenization. Beyond paper lies a space of possibility where every fragment speaks, and where creation is inseparable from care, critique, and play.
Collage, in this sense, is not the art of cutting but of listening. It teaches us that beauty is not in the whole but in the coexistence of differences; that to assemble is also to heal; and that liberation begins with the courage to rearrange the world.