NIC Kay, pushit, an exercise in getting well soon!!, 2019. Photo documentation from performance. Courtesy of the artist.
Through installation, video, and photography, the An Inherent Undoing brings together artists who complicate the potential for reconciliation and engage the limits of repair amidst societal fractures and structural violence. Artists include Kearra Amaya Gopee, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, kimi malka hanauer, Regina José Galindo, NIC Kay, New Red Order, Josephine Sales, and Zaina Zarour & Faris Shomali.
The exhibition meditates on the shortcomings of resolution, interrogating the concept of coherency as a tool of control and questioning governmental attempts at atonement for state-sanctioned brutality. The artists linger in the friction between “inherent” and “undoing,” the two words eroding against each other. As Marsh writes: “An Inherent Undoing is a continuous reckoning with structures and histories of harm, holding the acute awareness that repair is a fraught concept. Progress often demands the flattening of the complex persistence of violence, both exceptional and mundane, in everyday life. If cracks extend to the profound depths of society’s core, stemming from a foundational rupture, then is repair possible without a structural undoing?”
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, No Space for Redemption, 2024. Photo by Adam Reich
Kearra Amaya Gopee, divinity surplus, 2024. Photo by Adam Reich.
What remains in spite of the relentless, shape-shifting devastation of imperialism, determined to erase people, places, and ways of being that do not feed into its swelling hunger? [1] The ending is not an end, it is not a finality, but an iteration of a world that will find other manifestations. The artists in An Inherent Undoing understand that archives are incomplete and ever-growing, formed in the fissures of loss, in the glimpses and traces that carry critical information from the voices of those who have been dismissed.
Josephine Sales. Total Running Time, 2023/2026. Photo: Adam Reich.
kimi malka hanauer. on the edges of a mother tongue, 2026. Photo: Adam Reich.
How many times does an apology need to be uttered before it fails to register even as a performative act? What else can exist beside the imperative to repair? Can there be political potency channeled through despair and destruction? The artists grapple with the pervasive logics of anti-Blackness and transphobia as well as the ongoing genocide and settler colonialism from Indigenous communities across Turtle Island, to Palestine, and to Guatemala. Infrastructures that organize time – across labor, care, and surveillance – come into view, asking how access is regulated and dependency distributed within conditions where repair may operate as an extension of harm. An Inherent Undoing contends with a radically broken world, while also recognizing that this is not the totality of the lives we create and the communities we build.
Regina José Galindo. Tierra, 2013.
Zaina Zarour & Faris Shomali. The Aesthetics of Negative History, 2026. Photo: Adam Reich.
New Red Order. AlienNATION [star spangled], 2018.
NIC Kay, pushit!! an exercise in getting well soon, 2018. Photo: Adam Reich
[1] Thinking alongside artist kimi malka hanauer’s essay, “on the edges of a mother tongue.” C-Magazine, Issue 162: Tidal.