This group exhibition asks a simple question: is what we desire truly ours, or were we taught to want it?

The unicorn belongs to no single culture. The Arab world, Asia, medieval Europe, and Old Rus each imagined a rare one-horned creature on their own, and each searched for physical proof: a narwhal tusk, a rhinoceros horn, a mammoth bone, a giraffe at an emperor's court. The Arabic and Persian name for this creature is the karkadann.
Today trends change faster than our own taste can form. Feeds and algorithms tell us what to want, what counts as rare and what is worth owning, often before we ask ourselves. Against this background, an ancient myth about a creature that cannot be taken by force, only approached with sincerity, becomes a way to look closely at our own desires.

Three artists each offer their own way of hunting the karkadann:

• Marina Baisel (Russia) explores searching and possessing. When does desire become possession, and does possession ever satisfy desire? Her totems, built from discarded plastic, hand-finished steel and clay, make the unicorn an object we seek, transform and try to own.

• Chunkook Lee (South Korea) explores the real and the imagined. His hybrid ornamental sculptures and panels grow and mutate until they reach the line between the recognisable and the invented. His unicorn is the gap between what we see and what we think we see.

• Tatiana Chursina (Russia) explores the personal and the imposed. Her inward-facing abstract painting refuses narrative and leaves room for the viewer's own reading. Her unicorn is an image each of us builds alone.

In the end, the hunt matters more than the prey: the need to keep searching.
What is your unicorn?