An Inherent Undoing
Dr. Gervais Marsh, February 2026
Plain-text brochure essay

NIC Kay inches their body forward, face focused as they breathe through the movements. A white cord is tied around their neck and lifted into the air by a bunch of transparent helium filled balloons. Playful amusement is juxtaposed with the resonances of lynching and the tactics of horror deployed against Black people to extinguish their presence. Slow, deliberate steps accentuate the tension, their enduring body blurs past and present. Kay is neither released from nor subsumed by the physical and psychic weight of the performance. They move alongside the specter of violence. Black life, as always, in close proximity to the prospect of gra­tuitous harm.2 The affective charge of bearing witness is carved out by your position in society, and the reach of empathy is insufficient. Kay traverses the wake, as Christina Sharpe conceives, the ever-presence of anti-Black dynamics that contour public and private life. Anti-Blackness is the weather, the climate that cannot be rectified. “Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality.”3 Kay carries Sharpe’s words as they negotiate the sharp edges of a society intent on their decimation.

An Inherent Undoing is a continuous reckoning, a sustained being with structures and histories of harm, holding the acute awareness that repair is a fraught concept. Progress is often a demand that flattens the complex persistence of violence in everyday life, both the exceptional and the mundane. 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. Does one turn to revenge? Kearra Amaya Gopee posits, “Revenge is a clarifying force… Revenge is how you get clear, and justice is how you get even.”4 The artist inscribes a series of questions regarding the mobilization of hope into the fabric surface, which rotates by turning the foot pedal of the medieval torture rack in divinity surplus (2024):

“What does it mean to hope for another? For their wellbeing? For the world? When we deploy hope as a visioning strategy, do we wish for a life akin to our own for the other? How do we cope with the dissonance in desires when we realize that our hope-induced vision does not necessarily map neatly onto that of our peers? What is lost in the reconciliation between the two?”

The questions are incisions into the armor of hope as a yearning projected to conceal the material difficulties of existing under forces of marginalization, disposal and the ever-increasing precarity of capitalism. Gopee’s metalwork is devotional, a shrine with a spiritual vibration that unsettles the expectations of relation as a mutual, symbiotic connection and queries the relegation of hope to a noun, instead of a verb that prioritizes tangible action.5 It is what NIC Kay underscores across the suite of performances in GET WELL SOON! (2019), drawing on the words of aboli­tionist organizer and educator Mariame Kaba, “hope is a discipline,” not simply a longing, but animated through ongoing practice.6 When structural circumstances cause one to be unwell, does reprieve come forth through a complete collapse, or does the residue become encrusted on the body? Interlaced through the experiential registers of time, Soyica Colbert discerns, “wellness is a temporally bound state that requires examination of the relationship between trauma of the past and domination in the present.”7 Gopee’s installation requires labor through the body’s involvement, and the person operating the foot pedal must collaborate with another to align the embroidered captions with the soundscape and the video projection. From Gopee’s accompanying text, they ask, “when suffering grants you no salvation, how do you figure hope? For yourself or for the other?” If the circumstances of living are steeped in inequity, then for countless numbers of people suffering is a perpetual condition and hope has been discarded. The remedy may be a total disintegration of the current state of affairs.

The ongoing conceptual process for the exhibition delves into the work of numerous thinkers who engage questions of repair, reconciliation and sustained relationships to violence. I think with them, not within a binary oriented around agreement or dissent, but as an expanded contemplation on the difficulty these inquiries present. These theories transcend disciplines, attempting to grasp the dilemma of a world that is characterized by harm and is underpinned through the mechanisms of savage disregard. The words of poet Claudia Rankine are seared in my mind, “How to care for the injured body, the kind of body that can’t hold the content it is living?”8 Within the theoretical genealogies of repair, David Eng sug­gests persisting in the interstices between the psychoanalytic,9 which approaches repair as a continuous process, and political theory, which frames repair as a specific event or action that can create means of progress.10 “The gap between reparations (in the plural) as a noun and making reparation (in the singular) as a verb keeps open a space for new victims to be apprehended and new injuries to be claimed.”11 That space is pried open by Black Studies’ constant interrogative architecture towards anti-Blackness. Heard in Saidiya Hartman’s complication of redress, both under and in the afterlife of slavery, as facing the exceeding pain of Black fungibility, “in the insistent recognition of the violated body as human flesh.”12 It resonates in Calvin Warren’s Black nihilistic disavowal of the temporal potential of a democratic imagination to make strides in anti-Black societies, for time will not reduce suffering. Thus Black life necessitates a disinvestment in “formal thought, the world, destructive transcendence and immanence, and dogmatic preconditions.”15 An Inherent Undoing is undergirded by the fractal thinking advanced by Denise Ferreira da Silva, a poethics that distorts a conventional space-time and thus, “images the global as a part of the cosmos, and, as such, does not see it as constituting the ultimate ontic and ontological horizon for thinking.”16

Amidst a forceful unearthing, Regina José Galindo maintains a striking stillness, standing naked in the center of a field as a bulldozer digs up the soil around her. Galindo’s vulnerability in the video Tierra (2013) heightens the strength of her presence, confronting the gaze. The devastation of genocide exceeds comprehension, a systematic annihilation that cannot be quantified due to lives taken without acknowledgement. Numbers fail to account for the mass graves of indigenous people, of Maya Ixil, murdered during the Guatemalan civil war between 1960–1996. Genocide is an ecological crisis, and the land is sedimented with inestimable loss. Accountability will never truly be found in the government’s hands, for the massacre of expendable lives is too often State sanctioned, and outside the jurisdiction of those countries that feign concern. The appeal to rec­ognition is inadequate, as voiced by Zoé Samudzi discussing the Ovaherero and Nama Colonial Genocide in Namibia, “Inherent to the politics of recognition is some ushering into whiteness: the affirmation of genocide is, crudely, an extension of and assimilation into an always Eurocentric humanity through a frame of event unique­ness no matter the identity of the victims.”18 While former president Efraín Ríos Montt was sentenced to crimes of genocide in 2013, the year Galindo made the performance, there is no simplified justice for the mass killing. The rupture of mass extermination cannot be reconciled, one must sit with the fracture embedded in the landscape.

How many times does an apology need to be uttered before the performative act fails to register even as that? Government leaders echo the empty phrases “we are sorry” to indigenous communities in New Red Order’s film AlienNATION [star spangled] (2018), attempts at atonement for continued disre­gard, displacement and centuries of violent erasure. The apologies situate this harm, much like indigeneity, within the past, while the communities to whom the words are directed foster ways of being in the present. Guilt merely constricts “decolonization as metaphor,” elaborated in Eve Tuck and KW Yang’s seminal essay of the same name, rather than stimulating the measures that must be undertaken to affirm political change and strategies that emphasize the potential for indigenous futures.20 NRO asserts, “without continuous commitment to serve as accomplices to Indigenous people, institutional gestures of acknowledgement risk reconciling ‘settler guilt and complicity’ and rescuing ‘settler futurity.’”21 The environment is not what it was, and a fixation on a time that can never be returned to obfuscates what can actually be done. Give it back! Rematriation, a method evident across NRO’s practice, encour­ages land to be restituted to the hands of indigenous communities to whom it has always been home.

To consider futurity is not an acceptance of current conditions, but a recognition that the status quo cannot remain; something else must be enacted. Drawing on direct address, analogous to NRO and Kearra Amaya Gopee, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley unravels the rigidity of archives that have dismissed Black trans people, and forges new ones. No Space for Redemption (2024), an interactive visual novel, articulates pointed questions to the player, asking them to identify their own positionality and ethical beliefs around the protection of Black trans life, which dictates how the role-playing game experience proceeds. With no auto-pilot to move through the game—one must make intentional decisions. The penetrating intensity of the soundscape amplifies the emotional pressure, as the player navigates issues such as gender and racial migration surveillance in the airport, each scenario prompting a quick response with no grace for error. Liberal politics can breed neutrality, and Brathwaite-Shirley’s work demands that you make hard choices. Offering Black transfemininity through the theory and material realities of “unbecoming,” Nathan Alexander Moore writes, “Black transfemmes might be conceived as walking ruptures of temporality and the supposedly stable geographies of normative gender… an opening up and a pulling apart of the social fabric, a rending of our discursive lexicons, and the productive unsettling of our imaginaries.” Moore understands Black transfemininity both points, “toward those uncharted territories for more livable futures,” while also negotiating, “the violence that underpins and flows through and on this social positioning and embodied practice.”22 Brathwaite-Shirley’s work contends with the conflicts of these parallel realities, possibility adjacent to violence, and pulls from her own experiences, dreams, the news, and conversations with collaborators, while often incorporating voice recordings and images of friends. Each work con­tributes to a growing archive that attends to the trials and intricacies of Black trans life at the center.

kimi malka hanauer turns to the archive of al-Andalus, the society under the Muslim domain of the Iberian peninsula from 711 to 1492, to consider what remains in spite of the relentless, shape-shifting devastation of imperialism. Once a commons of Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities coalescing, not as an idyllic site but one of mutual respect for their life-ways, the region fell to hands of the Spanish Conquest, the looted resources fueling the terror of Columbus’ colonial voyage. hanauer ruminates on the after-ending of al-Andalus through the layered images from the surviving ruins of the Córdoba synagogue for the site-specific installation on the edges of a mother tongue (2026). An archive shaped through loss, gesturing towards the interwoven lives that have been made seemingly distinct through the upheaval of imperial conquest and Zionist settler colonialism.23 The archway is a portal to al-Andalus, a place that once was, and still courses through those who were forced to leave but have carried these cultural memories across generations. hanauer contemplates, “what happens in the perpetual after of recurrent imperial endeavors to make an “end” of a people, place, and time?” The ending is not an end, it is not a finality, but an iteration of living that will find other manifestations. Within the fundamental rupture of the Nakba, a catastrophe that persists, there can be no cursory rectification to the continued genocidal impulse that seeks to annihilate the Palestinian people whose feet have long stood firmly on that land.24 To become enfolded in the fragmentation, for the past does not dissipate in the reach for restitution, Matthew Chin urges, “living with the recursive effects of the past in the present by holding on to the moments of rupture,” rather than looking to the practice of reparation, which, “often involves a juridical accounting of past harms as a means of repairing the effects of violence in the present.”25 Palestinian existence is irrepressible, their land will always be and liberation will not cease. hanauer traces modes of relation that have been reconfigured but endure, offering, “Bounded by the limitations of my own imperial present, I’ve been trying to gather with these tides: unspoken moments of relational excess that seep through empire’s hold.”26 A relational excess that will not be contained.

For Brathwaite-Shirley, hanauer, and the duo Zaina Zarour and Faris Shomali, the archive is incomplete. Zarour and Shomali dispel notions of coherency as a measure of validity for a Palestinian archive, for Zionist occupation has caused inconceivable devastation. Within the fissures of loss are glimpses of Palestinian creative practices that Israel’s settler colonial power has sought to extinguish. Artists names mentioned in newspaper clippings, carried in memories passed down, their work glimpsed in the records that survive. In the remnants of artworks imprinted on canvas in The Aesthetics of Negative History (ongoing), they envision Palestinian art historical archives arising through splintered circumstances. Shomali writes, “This dynamic of loss and dispersion, which has made Palestine’s art history only possible as a history of fragments, inevitably confronts every historian of Palestine and its art.”29 This thread extends into The Negation of Exile (2021), as the artists retrace historical perceptions of Palestine through the outcomes of the Zionist Congress and drawn into the imagined landscape of the infamous postcard30 by artist Ephraim Moshe Lilien.31 The charting of a visual manifest destiny, a poignant signifier that the genocidal arc supersedes the contemporary moment. Pulling apart Zionism’s temporal construction, Adam HajYahia insists, “One must decipher the Zionist time regime to understand the logics of Palestinian resistance and what it has put forth (or brought backward). Since the Nakba, Palestinians have been caught in an ongoing present catastrophe that cannibalizes itself, reproducing a static temporality of enduring violence.”32 Zionist settler colonialism was long plotted, is still plotting. Its undoing must come through a fundamental reconstitution, following HajYahia, “an abolition of the conditions that render exile the only remaining possibility,”34 and a breaking open for Palestinian return in perpetuity.

Temporalities of care are controlled by systems of containment, disposability and capitalist extraction, intricately dictated in ways often overlooked or taken for granted. Attending to conditions of social disablement and access that shape perceptual experiences, Josephine Sales’ Total Running Time (2023) wrestles with the surveillance of those incarcerated, the difficulties of communication with the outside, and the psycho-social torturing impacts of these restrictions, all buckling under the weight of capitalism’s unending hunger for productivity driven by the invented functions of linear time. The modes of production will discard those who do not meet the measurements, as Marta Russell and Ravi Malhotra foreground, “disability is a socially created category derived from labor relations, a product of the exploitative economic structure of capitalist society: one which creates (and then oppresses) the so-called disabled body as one of the conditions that allow the capitalist class to accumulate wealth.”35 The sound of Pulses (2023) beckons you, transmitted through sonic and vibrational waves that you strain to decipher. The experience of inhumane confinement cannot be fully grasped by those on the outside, unless they were also once disposed of into the prison industrial complex. Hands and ears brush up against the wall, reaching for a splintered intimacy fore­closed by the State. The automated recording of the operator is a reminder that any form of access is contingent on powers that have no interest in your well-being. The lightbox work Day for Night (2023) holds the tightness of this capture, as even light is a method of control. Does my feeling of security hinge on another? SECURE. Is my safety constituted by someone else’s precarity? We are all entangled in the violent web of law and order, the false promises of protection amid the descent into crisis.

The exhibition lingers in the friction between “inherent” and “undoing,” the two words eroding against each other. There are no conclusive an­swers, no clearly marked pathways. Nothing is settled. It is a consideration on the capacity to hold, to live alongside irresolution, specters of harm that for many are experienced as all consuming. What is left in the refusal of inadequate attempts at repair or making amends? Situated within contention, difficulty becomes a fateful companion not by choice. It is structurally delineated, buttressed by histories of injury, assault and extraction. An Inherent Undoing reverberates towards an unrav­eling, the disintegration of systems that provide scaffolding for cruelty. Violence is immense, and it is not the totality of living. What lies in the wake?

ENDNOTES

1 Marshall, Paule. The chosen place, the timeless people. Vintage, 1984.

2 Scholar Frank Wilderson distinguishes the violence that Black people face as “gratuitous,” that is, exceeding any reason or justification, it is both disproportionate and indiscriminate with regards to anyone identified as Black. Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, white & black: Cinema and the structure of US antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010.

3 Sharpe, Christina. In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press, 2016, 11.

4 From a forthcoming interview with Kearra Amaya Gopee and Gervais Marsh for the catalog of the Carnegie International 2026.

5 Johnson, Shameekia Shantel. “On Building ‘A Small Space’”. Forgotten Lands Volume 07: Poetics of Architecture, 2025.

6 Kaba, Mariame. “So you’re thinking about becoming an abolitionist.” Level (2020).

7 Colbert, Soyica Diggs. “INTRODUCTION: ‘Do You Want to Be Well?’” In The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture, edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Robert J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-Hussen. 1–16. Rutgers University Press, 2016.

8 Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: an American lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.

9 The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein theorized reparation as the process of attending to mental repairs for the damage experienced in one’s internal world, while also recognizing destructive impulses towards those one cares for. Klein, Melanie. “Love, guilt, and reparation, and other works, 1921~ 1945.” (1921).

10 Klein, Melanie. Love, guilt, and reparation, and other works, 1921~ 1945. (1921).

11 Eng, David L. Reparations and the Human. Duke University Press, 2025.

12 Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth century america (1997).

13 Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salteaters, Random House, 1980.

14 Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. “Black Grotesquerie.” American Literary History 29, no. 4, 2017, 668.

15 Warren, Calvin. “Abandoning time: Black nihilism and the democratic imagination.” American Studies 66, no. 1 (2021): 247-251.

16 Da Silva, Denise Ferreira, and Denise da Silva. “Fractal thinking.” ACCeSsions, The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College 27 (2016).

17 Moten, Fred. Stolen Life: Consent not to be a single being. Duke University Press, 2018, 131.

18 Samudzi, Zoé. “Reparative Futurities: Thinking From the Ovaherero and Nama Colonial Genocide.” The Funambulist, 2020.

19 Zhang, Erique, Julian Kevon Glover, Ava LJ Kim, Tamsin Kimoto, Nathan Alexander Moore, æryka jourdaine hollis o'neil, and LaVelle Ridley. “A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory.” TSQ 10, no. 3-4, 2023, 333.

20 Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future… The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation.” “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society 1, no. 1 (2012): 3.

21 “New Red Order on land acknowledgment and land return.” Creative Futures, Ford Foundation, 2025.

22 Zhang, Erique, Julian Kevon Glover, Ava LJ Kim, Tamsin Kimoto, Nathan Alexander Moore, æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, and LaVelle Ridley. “A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory.” TSQ 10, no. 3-4 (2023): 332.

23 hanauer, kimi malka. “al-Andalus’s tenacious and multiple resuscitations across geographies, generations, and cultures after its seeming material destruction on the Iberian Peninsula makes unabashedly clear: no matter the depths of attempted destruction, Palestine, just as al-Andalus, will never cease to exist. In the enduring after-endings of repeated imperial atrocities, we, all those who witness and remain, are tasked with material demands: to return that which empire claims as its so-called ruins.” “on the edges of a mother’s tongue”, C Magazine, Issue 152: Tidal.

24 “Nakba” is the Arabic word for catastrophe and refers to the violent displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli war.

25 Chin, Matthew. Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica. Duke University Press, 2024, 8-9.

26 hanauer, kimi malka. “on the edges of a mother’s tongue”, C Magazine, Issue 152: Tidal.

27 Warren, Calvin. “Abandoning time: Black nihilism and the democratic imagination.” American Studies 66, no. 1, 2021, 250.

28 kimi malka hanauer, toward an ungovernable study: disordering the stacks, A Blade of Grass.

29 Scomali, Faris. “The Exhibition as (Potential) World: On Resurgent Nahda.” The Avery Review, 2024.

30 The postcard is a key form of Zionist art and features an angel pointing towards Zion, symbolizing salvation from exile.

31 The Zionist Congress was established in 1897 as the main organizing gathering of the Zionist Organization. The 5th Congress was pivotal with the establishment of the Jewish National Fund, which was used to purchase land in Palestine and a greater move for Zionist cultural development.

32 HajYahia, Adam. “The Principle of Return. The repressed ruptures of Zionist Time.” Parapraxis Magazine, 2024.

33 Darwish, Mahmoud. Journal of an Ordinary Grief, translated from Arabic by Ibrahim Muhawi, New York: Archipelago Books, 2010, 15.

34 HajYahia, Adam. “The Principle of Return. The repressed ruptures of Zionist Time.” Parapraxis Magazine, 2024.

35 Russell, Marta. Capitalism and disability: Selected writings by Marta Russell. Haymarket Books, 2019, 2.

36 “The Black woman in the Civil Rights struggle,” in Joanne Grant , ed. Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, 1998.

37 Reparative Futurities: Thinking From the Ovaherero and Nama Colonial Genocide. The Funambulist Magazine, 2020.

Missing endnotes correspond to images and quotes found in the full brochure PDF.