8 August - 12 September 2026

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.

Working across painting, sculpture, printmaking and found objects, the artists dwell in archives, dreams and ruptures, foregrounding circularity and entanglement as productive means of thinking and being. From reimagining histories, sustaining pauses, looping and unpicking set logics, each artist insists on staying with the difficulties and using small gestures to propose potential for repair.

For the Martiniquan philosopher Édouard Glissant, who inspired Ramírez, tactics of repair can be reflected on in two ways: un détour - a tactical diversion or un retour, describing the notion of return. Each offers different routes and possibilities of new realities; un retour more directly requires dialogue with the past. Similarly, ‘Stay/Return: Tactics of Repair’ offers a space for thinking against structures that reward flight from the difficult parts. Instead, the artists here reflect on ways by which history is re-encountered, reimagined and sustained. They engage landscapes shaped by colonial imagination, inherited objects marked by time, wounds left by displacement and the traces of ecological corrosion. 

Nina Turok Shapiro’s work, for instance, is quiet yet powerful. She begins with what she calls ‘hints' - whispers and small moments that briefly nod to time passed. She does this, using fragments found within family archives, reappropriating them to create silk-screen prints that reflect on ancient stories told. While Shapiro works through the intimate gesture of remaking, Nazeer Jappie locates his work in the act of stopping altogether. For him, undoing requires a moment of pause - the importance of halting what would otherwise be a progression toward a continually destructive path. His serene paintings that coalesce the mundane and the absurd reveal scenes that call into question memory and how reality is experienced. They remind us that, indeed, painting is one of the slowest mediums there is. To paint (and to look at a painting) is to be in dialogue with time itself.

Nazeer Jappie, The Irrevocable, 2026, Oil on board, 33.3 x 29.9cm

 

 

For Elize Vossgätter,  a complete return is rendered impossible. Her work reflects how material life - organic and industrial - presents itself as continuously porous, unstable and transformative. By responding to her materials in the process of carving, heating and pouring, she is reminded that nothing alive can survive by becoming completely closed. Materials - beeswax, wood, pigment - have the capacity to soften, flow and harden without ever returning to their original state. With each encounter, matter carries forward… it absorbs, filters, resists and responds.

Leonardo Sitoe begins with memory and extends it through myth and dreams. Made with found materials, wood cutouts and tree branches, his work draws on Afro-Surrealism and dream narratives to unearth ambiguous figures that occupy the space between human and non-human entities. His figures speak to fractured histories and dreaming as an act of reclamation. For him, Afro-surrealism itself is a process of undoing habitual ways of seeing while taking seriously the language embedded within materials.

While Sitoe approaches his work through the mythic, Hugo Kabeya grounds his in lived experience. His mixed media abstract compositions are situated within his personal history of forced displacement. By unpicking structures that make some lives seem expandable (particularly those of migrants and refugees), he reminds us of the importance of meditating on the impact of trauma on people's lives, tracing the effects of minerals such as cobalt and the cost of extraction on human lives.

Hugo Kabeya, Catalyst, 2026, Mixed media on canvas (Hg cinnabar), 60 x 40 cm (Diptych)

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. 

Through this exhibition, the artists ask us what it might mean to work back from what is inherited. What it might mean to stay with the troubles, complications and violences of the past. They propose repair as a continuous state of reworking what already exists. They ask us: as materials age, degrade, mark, sully and transform, what histories remain contained, active and unresolved, ready to be encountered and confronted?