The exhibition’s title, You’re only happy when you can see something die!, is borrowed from a line Marilyn Monroe throws at Clark Gable in The Misfits (1961), her final completed role. In the scene, she watches cowboys rope wild mustangs for slaughter, delivering the line with fury at men who only seem to feel alive when killing something beautiful. It lands, in part, because it is Monroe who says it: the most looked-at body of the century, doll-perfect, endlessly reproduced, and later resurrected by a culture that could not keep her but has never stopped consuming her. Her line in The Misfits becomes an accusation about appetite: the kind of gaze that craves the sight of another body failing

At NEVEN, the East London gallery’s newly laid carpet greets you before any work does, the floor turned domestic, the space softened into a room. You enter not quite a gallery, but someone’s parlour: a set dressed for an interior life, where bodies, images and memories are held rather than simply displayed. The exhibition is not interested in death as spectacle. Instead, it makes a more thoughtful and generous argument: to seal something is not always to kill it; preservation can be devotion, a way of keeping faith with a body, an image, a life the world tried to lose. The timing is not incidental, because the lineage these artists draw upon – a trans and queer canon – is still unwritten, still being shaped in rooms like this one.

JC McCormack sets the tone for the gallery from the moment you walk in. Their installation of 1950s German Democratic Republic silk tulips and peonies is sealed in plastic and framed by hanging Venetian blinds, like a strange domestic shrine. It gives the exhibition its landscape: a contained, artificial garden that the other works seem to grow out of. The exhibition text reads this sealed environment as something rendered inert, the flowers “dormant” and petrified against time. I read it slightly differently. Plastic does not decay; it will outlast the flowers it holds, and very likely outlive us. The flowers, silk and artificial, will never wilt either. To wrap something already imperishable does not only feel like burial. It can also feel like care: an attempt to keep something from disappearing.

McCormack makes the apparatus of display visible, from the plastic wrapping to the dramatic lighting. The artifice is not hidden; it is the surface itself, lovingly maintained. If McCormack gives the exhibition its atmosphere, the other works offer their own staged moments: figures and objects held in suspension. What gathers them together is the doll, an uncanny hinge between the living and the made. Unlike the exhibition’s title, the doll can never die.

Greer Lankton is the show’s emotional centre. A pioneer of New York’s East Village scene, she spent her life making bodies from wire, papier-mâché, fabric and paint: figures stitched, posed and remade, carrying her own image, longing and transness into forms she could hold and restage at will. She built the kin and icons the world had not yet learned to appreciate, including Candy Darling, imagined in Candy and Mark (1985). To die at 38 and still, three decades later, animate a room of younger artists is its own kind of refusal. Lankton did not outlive her time so much as keep arriving in everyone else’s. Her figures, by turns glamorous, grotesque and witty, do not stay politely contained in their vitrines. Her presence moves through the exhibition: into McCormack’s plastic, Tiina Vanhatupa’s diligently reworked Blythes, and Ki Yoong’s miniature Monroe. She appears as a beautiful sister from another time, defying every boundary the art world tries to draw around her.

Tiina Vanhatupa’s customised Blythe dolls bring that idea into miniature. Stripped of their factory features, rerooted and repainted, they reframe the doll, and the body, as something authored rather than issued. That this is the first time Vanhatupa has shown her work in a gallery context feels significant: here, craft slips its assigned category and is received, fully, as art. The Blythe fandom is as peculiar as it is devoted, and the task its customisers set themselves is stranger still: to turn a mass-produced object into a person, something with a name, a set of features, a recognisable life. Here, that doll is Haki (2026), customised beyond her serial number and now wearing a small maker’s mark at the nape of her neck.

Ki Yoong’s small painting Marilyn (Roslyn, Red) (2026), inspired by a behind-the-scenes still from The Misfits, rewards proximity. From across the room, Monroe is instantly recognisable; the closer you lean, the more vulnerable she becomes, the image loosening into oil and tenderness. The scale is its own provocation: an icon endlessly inflated by reproduction is returned here to the size of a held thing, something private rather than public. Built up in thin layers, the brushwork gives the surface a fleshy texture. Monroe is not fixed in oil so much as slowly arriving through it, the details of her face surfacing the longer you stay with her. It is, honestly, extraordinary. Yoong’s painting points to a quality the whole exhibition shares: a technical accomplishment that is patient, careful and made to endure.

Across the exhibition, one idea keeps returning: desire, this amorphous yearning, and the strange labour it asks of us. Each artist makes or keeps a surrogate body, something built to be looked at, dressed, held and loved in a form that will stay still. We make these figures for the people we cannot otherwise keep – the lost, the idolised – and for the selves we are still rehearsing toward.

The doll, it turns out, is one of the truest models we have for how any self is assembled: chosen, costumed, posed and repeated until it passes for nature. Even Monroe, the show reminds us, was dressed daily into an image until the image was almost all that was left of her. There is no clean border between the made figure and the made self; we are each, in some measure, our own doll-maker. The figures across the show – made, displayed or drawn from cultural memory – are reflected onto us, shaped by wanting and warmed by whoever reaches for them.

The exhibition’s thesis of figures held in states of suspension, made to mimic life without being animated by it, turns out to be only half true. This is Leo Costelloe’s first outing as curator, who brings to it the themes and preoccupations of his own practice, experimenting with them now against the difficult task of placing others artists in conversation. Made in an ongoing dialogue with gallery director Helen Neven, their collaboration accumulates rather than arranges; they think in layers, in surplus, in the slow build of a room that means more than the sum of its objects. What they have made is not a holding place for the dead, but rather a room of suspended life, charged and insistent, a doll’s house, where to preserve something is to keep faith with it, and where nothing held still or preserved is ever fully surrendered.

You're only happy when you can see something die! runs at NEVEN, London, E2 9RA, until 18 July 2026.