The works in this exhibition resist the apparent passivity of Leda, a Greek princess and later Spartan queen, whose name is irrevocably tied to her rape-seduction by Zeus in the form of a swan. The Voice of Leda shifts the viewpoint and attempts to parse elements of Leda’s story through experience and emotion; the viewer is asked to engage with shifting form and colour to extract meaning and feeling other than that which is placed on the surface.

Kulewska Akyel has taken as a counterpoint the sixteenth-century Leda and the Swan after Michelangelo Buonarroti, part of the MUŻA collection. The painting is unsettling, partly because of the nature of the narrative it contains, but also because of the contorted position of the elongated sleeping figure and the insidious bird entwined around it.

The abstracted imagery within the works in this room embodies a dilemma; how to carry within us the myths, histories, imageries that have been handed down to us through millennia? How to approach a story of glamourised rape in the twenty-first century? Thus, the shifting and ambiguous shapes; limbs, beaks, pieces of shells, feathers, and botanical forms. A sense of unease is present, as is an opacity suggesting that destiny may not be a fixed thing and that we do not have to accept our fate without question.

In this collection of works, Kulewska Akyel continues her painterly preoccupation with abstracted form and colour; the colour blue resonates a strength along with a deep, melancholic quality. Feather motifs and the use of fabric as a quasi-sculptural material are also present; both elements that she has experimented with in the past. The works contain a visceral quality also; the use of flesh-tones - warm, natural pinks and oranges against muffled and aquatic blues - speaks of the body and hints at intimacy. Some shapes shift between birdlike and body-like; as Zeus and Leda become indistinguishable from each other, so her voice takes precedence and gives her strength.

Kulewska Akyel has asked a fundamental contemporary question; how do we dialogue with classical imagery that is fundamentally problematic in its viewpoint? A possible answer seems to lie in the gradual shifting of our allegiances and empathies, from once-powerful Zeus to the emerging voice of Leda herself.