Birds Fly Low is a research project by artist and photographer Annabel Elgar, published in the seventh issue of HAPAX magazine, which now takes on a new dimension within the exhibition space of HAPAX Living Room in London, transforming it into an environment suspended between imagination and reconstruction.

The project stems from the discovery of a heterogeneous archive gathered inside a sewing box. Whose box is it? What story do the objects it contains tell? Through photography, Elgar pieces together its fragments, working as a kind of archaeologist confronted with a new discovery and offering a reinterpretation of the figure of KVM, whose identity remains a mystery.
Inside the box are various sewing materials, including needles, fabrics, threads, and thimbles; faded, blurred, and damaged photographs that suggest glimpses of a life that can never be fully grasped; scattered notes, medical prescriptions, and a small booklet containing instructions for building a spy balloon, further expanding the range of possible interpretations. The ambiguity that runs through these materials shows how a forgotten archive can, even decades later, become a starting point for the construction of new narratives.
Birds Fly Low thus moves along the boundary between document and fiction, transforming the fragments of an anonymous archive into an open-ended narrative, where what emerges from the materials that have been found intertwines with what can only be imagined.

Date: from September 24 to October 10, 2026
More Info: HAPAX Living Room

Image: © Annabel Elgar, Untitled # 6, 2024, 40 x 50cm C-type print

22/09/26