For over twelve years, Charlotte de Cock has returned to Bombay Beach, a town shaped by the slow environmental collapse of the Salton Sea. As water recedes and toxic dust rises, life here unfolds under conditions of ongoing exposure and neglect.

Her long-term involvement with the Bombay Beach Biennale: a non-commercial, site-specific platform rooted in this landscape, placed her practice inside the social reality of the place rather than outside it. Through repeated presence and close ties to its core community, including a long-standing friendship with co-founder Stefan Ashkenazy, her work became part of the fabric of Bombay Beach.

The works in this exhibition emerge from that sustained proximity. They are portraits formed through encounter, not representation. Some of the people depicted are no longer alive. Their absence is not framed as tragedy, but as fact, inseparable from a place where ecological and human vulnerability overlap.

Instead of trying to document a crisis or offer resolution De Cock portrays her personal journey of the quiet persistence of being present whilst eternalizing the local community.