Stay/Return: Tactics of Repair

In response to the disorientation felt by populations across the world, as shifting tides bring instability, we might ask: what strategies do we have for better relations?

When our lives and systems that govern them are shaped by ongoing histories of violent extraction, we might ask: what tactics can make repair possible?

Professor of philosophy Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez proposes the idea of staying as a practice of resistance. To stay and to repair in ways that might allow us to face and change the crises of our times.

Using Ramírez’s proposition as a point of departure, Untitled presents ‘Stay/Return: Tactics of Repair’. The exhibition brings together artists Elize Vossgätter, Hugo Kabeya, Josephine Grindrod, Leonardo Sitoe, Nazeer Jappie and Nina Turok Shapiro, all of whom consider remaining and returning as modes of repair.

Josephine Grindrod reflects on imperial displacement, which she approaches through the seductive and dangerous logic of the colonial image itself. In her paintings – which take reference from the particular site of the port city of Durban, whose founding was inseparable from the colonial imagination – we find tessellated and layered figurative and abstract forms sustained with attention to colour, mark, and edge-quality. Reflecting critically on repair from those ‘unthought knowns’ which painting-as-dream perspective may engender, she revisits these sites of former erasure as a means to now remember, now be capable of response to.