The ubiquitous architecture of domestic daily routines provides the ground for most of the works in Sleepover. Noticeboards, shelving, DVD racks and keyrings evoke the trajectory between home and school, while configurations of nail varnish bottles, stickers, postcards and scribbled notes present an intensified abstraction of the adolescent desire to construct worlds within bedrooms.

As in any domestic space, the objects and images arranged here map out layered networks of relationships between people and places. Materials have been donated from grandparents’ homes, gifted by housemates, lifted from the pavement, bought from Ilford Lane in East London and sticker wholesalers in Jaipur; through finding and keeping these objects, they become precious. This drive to collect, retain and display is something both Mhach Durban and Kardashian trace back to their respective maternal grandmothers, who would similarly use their carefully curated collections of photographs and trinkets to decorate every household surface. Many of the magnets, badges, notes and bindis used in the exhibition have come directly from the homes of Brady and Mhach Durban’s grandparents; in placing them alongside items from the two artist’s own collections, the duo stage a conversation implicating multiple generations and geographies.

Presiding over these constructions are glamour shots of Bollywood stars, including Rekha, Amrita Arora, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Kajol and Rani Mukerjee. Rekha’s eyes in particular appear again and again, closely cropped and accentuated in the artworks Musical Notes, 2023, Pink Ladies, 2023, and Prem, 2023. Their persistent, multiplied stare challenges the viewer to bisect the web of gazes that suffuses the gallery and in doing so attempt to participate in the silent exchange that seems to be taking place between these otherwordly figures. The images are marked by the traces of touch and translation - fading, crumpling, discolouration - and embellished with inscriptions and childhood charms. As a result of these interventions, the images take on the status of devotional icons, materialising the desire and aspiration that these figures command as ciphers of ideal femininity within South Asia and the Indian diaspora. Placed alongside the pair’s various relics of pre-pubescent crushes - a sticker of High School Musical’s Troy Bolton, a postcard featuring the glistening abs of Aaron Taylor-Johnson - the actresses become one part of a sprawling fan culture landscape, deconstructed and restaged within the gallery space.

In Athen & Nina: Sleepover, Nina Mhach Durban and Athen Kardashian employ nostalgia as an active force. Using a distinctive visual vocabulary accrued through the artists’ own experiences and familial relationships, the duo’s work presents a negotiation between collective and private memory within the context of the migrant archive.