For Art-O-Rama 2025, NEVEN presents a solo booth of new work by British artist H M Baker, extending her ongoing interest in the aesthetics of power, control, and corporate performance. This latest body of work continues her long-term project Maxine, a multi-format narrative centred on a fictional mid-level financial analyst navigating the world of high finance.

Baker brings together image, architecture and narrative to question how order is staged, distributed and internalised in contemporary life and the workplace. At the centre of the presentation are two wall pieces of carpet tiles, screenprinted with imagery from James Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi Aliens. This reference resonates with Barbara Creed’s analysis of Alien (1979) and the “monstrous feminine,” where the female body is cast as both attraction and threat. Baker reframes this cinematic logic within the corporate environment, positioning professionalism as a stage on which gender, ambition, and complicity are continually negotiated under the pressure of surveillance and performance.

The carpet tiles, of the kind prevalent in office interiors, carry with them the logic and residue of professional space: modular, mute, designed to endure. Baker uses these surfaces to stage a grid-like composition that recalls both open-plan office layouts and scenographic staging, drawing on her research into the inherently choreographic nature of corporate environments, where architecture and interior design shape bodies and behaviours. The workplace is a site of scripted reality, movement, legibility, and hierarchy; a theatre of professional conduct in which roles are rehearsed, gestures are codified, and power is rendered spatially visible. The fair booth itself is a constructed, self-contained environment within the design of the wider art fair, drawing attention to the fair itself as a space where performance, staging, movement, visibility, and power are arranged and at play.

Mounted on the walls are retrofitted 1980s Seiko clocks, their faces replaced by a monochrome images of birds of prey, also drawn from film. Recast by Baker as sentinels of judgment, these avian figures serve as minor but potent characters within the world of Maxine: personifications of managerial surveillance. The functioning wall clocks – set to London, New York, Tokyo and Marseille’s local times – also reference the symbolic role of clocks in the architecture of finance: the ubiquitous office wall clock, the trading floor’s tickers, and the split-second discipline associated with 1980s stock market culture. For Maxine, time and surveillance become pressures and metrics of productivity, performance and potential failure.

Baker’s practice operates at the intersection of sociological inquiry and aesthetic form. With a tone that moves between humour and precision, she treats corporate aesthetics not just as subjects to be critiqued, but as shapers of desire, ambition, and modes of being. Her use of materials like office carpet and wall clocks reveals the residual affect of these environments: their rationality, their seductive control, their quiet violence.

The reappropriated imagery from film construct a visual representation of Maxine’s world, Baker creating a composite fiction shaped by the cinematic imaginary of workplace thrillers, office dramas and the surface gloss of white-collar life. Her Art-O-Rama installation’s visual references and modular logic are haunted by questions of complicity and control, while the clocks echo the mechanisms through which professional subjects are measured and regulated. In turn, the imaginary character of Maxine acts as both spectral protagonist and lens through which Baker explores the internalisation of capitalist ideals, the aestheticisation of labour, and the dissonance between corporate ideology and lived experience.

H M BAKER is a British artist living and working in London. Baker’s film, performance and print works explore the choreography of late capitalism, interrogating forms of labour that condition daily life and shape experience and exploring themes such as power structures, architectural forms, and feminism’s ambivalence in historical and contemporary corporate contexts.

She was the subject of a solo exhibition at Rathbone Institute, London (2025) and upcoming exhibitions include Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana (2025). Recent exhibitions and performances include NEVEN, London (2025); Ginny on Frederick, London (2024); Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2024); SITE Gallery, Sheffield (2022); Roberts Institute of Art, London (2022); Mimosa House, London (2019); Becky’s Unit, London (2019); Chateau International at Tenderbooks, London (2018); Cell Project Space, London (2018); Guest Projects, London (2018); The Koppel Project, London (2017); Mom’s Favorite, Los Angeles (2016); The Depot, London (2016). Her moving image work BIG TIME was shortlisted and screened as part of the CIRCA Prize 2024. Baker was part of the Jan Van Eyck Artist Residency programme (2023-2024).