With I’m fine, maturing, Melissa Mabesoone presents her first institutional solo exhibition as an individual artist. Alongside her longstanding collaboration within the duo buren—where she and Oshin Albrecht explore questions of community, gender roles and (art) history—Mabesoone has been developing a solo practice in which characters, texts and video worlds are continuously mutating. I’m fine, maturing brings these strands together into a single exhibition, showing how a film work can unfold into a spatial installation, and how an installation can in turn become the fertile ground for a new film.

The exhibition consists of two rooms that operate like communicating vessels. Maturation Station marks the end point of a multi-year trajectory that began as research and a performative lecture, evolved into a film, and here appears as a spatial installation. The fictional world of a shrimp nursery becomes a lens through which to speak about labour, care and the social logics that determine what “maturing” and “adulthood” might mean. My Own Private Bedroom departs from the teenage bedroom as a site where identity, desire and image culture intertwine. The staged room simultaneously functions as studio, film set and stage for Crywanker, a character oscillating between melancholy and fantasy. Together, the two spaces reveal how identities are constructed, performed, policed and rewritten.

In I’m fine, maturing, forms, roles and materials are in constant flux, just as the exhibition itself represents a moment within an ongoing process: it closes one chapter even as it opens another.