TUI CARO-LISTER
MAD BELIEFS.
“Mad Beliefs invites viewers to consider how photographic images can both reveal and construct lived experience, an inquiry central to the medium’s ongoing relevance.”
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This September, Tui Caro-Lister presents Mad Beliefs, a debut solo exhibition that navigates the liminal space between observation and invention. Informed by her background in illustration and her experience of bipolarity, Caro-Lister’s photographs do not document so much as dramatise; we watch as the everyday becomes uncanny, theatrical, and emotionally heightened.
A limited-edition book of Mad Beliefs, featuring the complete photographic series alongside original writing by the artist—will be released to coincide with the exhibition. Only 100 hand-numbered copies will be available.
The title, Mad Beliefs, is borrowed from a lyric in Grant Lee Buffalo’s The Shining Hour, a song that once soundtracked her childhood. Like the song, Caro-Lister’s images channel a sense of associative memory, part confessional, part mythmaking. Her portraits, often rendered in stark black and white, amplify the tensions of intimacy and performance, capturing friends, strangers, and collaborators in moments of striking vulnerability and stylised exaggeration.
This is not photography as passive witnessing. Rather, Caro-Lister constructs a visual tableau that oscillates between cinematic realism and psychological surrealism. Her subjects, whether dancers in motion, aristocrats in repose, or youth caught mid-glance, are less depicted than imagined, shaped by the artist’s singular inner world. There is a palpable sense of empathy and theatricality at play, one that reframes personal experience as a shared, if unstable, mythology.
The exhibition unfolds across a series of European cities, but its emotional geography is more expansive: it traces the contours of euphoria, volatility, longing, and a sense of belonging. These are images forged in extremes of light, contrast, and emotional pitch mirroring Caro-Lister’s lived experience with mental health. In this way, Mad Beliefs is both diaristic and performative: a portrait of the artist as a world builder, constructing alternate realities from the fragments of everyday life.
With nods to the visual languages of fashion photography, music videos, and graphic novels, Caro-Lister blurs the boundary between fantasy and documentary. Yet what grounds her work is its profound humanism. Beneath the stylisation lies an unmistakable tenderness, her belief in people, in beauty, and in the possibility of transformation through image-making.
A limited-edition book of Mad Beliefs, featuring the complete photographic series alongside original writing by the artist—will be released to coincide with the exhibition. Only 100 hand-numbered copies will be available.
Hester Baldwin - Managing Director, 2025
