The Missing Tooth of the Father
Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present The Missing Tooth of the Father, a solo exhibition by Abi Shehu. In Shehu’s first solo show at the Voloshyn Gallery, the work explores the volatile architecture of the face, focusing on the mouth as a site of rupture and resistance. Through sculptural interventions, Shehu destabilizes conventional facial structures, allowing the mouth to expand beyond its constraints into an unsettling, autonomous presence.
In Shehu’s work, the mouth emerges as an entity in rebellion—an orifice exposing its raw interiority. Detached from the harmonized composition of the face, it becomes a void, a black hole through which bodily torment is exorcised. Shehu suggests a fundamental disconnect: while the face expresses, the body remains trapped, unable to articulate its suffering fully.
Challenging the face as a symbol of identity and order, Shehu interrogates its role in distinguishing humans from animals. She posits that the face, rather than extending the body, is a mechanism of control—an artifice suppressing corporeal instincts. The mouth, by contrast, is an agent of disorder, dismantling the rigid face-body hierarchy. The precarious alignment of teeth becomes the last vestige of this struggle, attempting—and failing—to restore order.
The missing tooth is both biographical and metaphorical, alluding to Shehu’s father’s fate as an immigrant crossing the border. The fragility of the tooth—destined to loosen and fall—echoes the precariousness of belonging, embodiment, and survival. Disrupted dentition, an obscene smile, or a gaping maw mark the disintegration of the face and, by extension, the unraveling of identity.
Placed upon undulating ceramic structures, Shehu’s sculptures evoke bodies in distress, contorted by unseen forces. Figures such as the anorexic body on a bidet (collapsing the boundary between oral and anal), the child consuming dirt (becoming one with the earth), and the infamous "Mr. Eat-All" (devourer of planes and cars) embody the mouth’s capacity for total consumption—until nothing remains.
The Missing Tooth of the Father radically reconsiders the face as a contested space where desire, decay, and disorder converge. Through Shehu’s incisive sculptural language, the mouth becomes a site of both loss and revelation—a space where the body speaks in its own fractured, uncontainable voice.
