Exhibition Details

Southern Guild inaugurates its permanent New York gallery in Tribeca, New York, with Used, a solo exhibition by South African conceptual artist Usha Seejarim. This marks her second solo presentation with the gallery and her first in the United States. Known for transforming everyday domestic materials into sculptural forms, Seejarim interrogates the intersections of gender, labour and power through works made from repurposed irons, wooden clothespins and other household objects.
Bringing together a new body of wall-based and sculptural works, Used extends the artist’s three decade-long practice by examining how repetition, care and endurance are inscribed in domestic materials (and the bodies that use them).
Inspired in part by writer and scholar Sara Ahmed’s reflections on 'use,' the exhibition considers the domestic sphere as a site where labour, intimacy and social expectations converge. Through accumulative arrangements of everyday objects, Seejarim reconfigures tools associated with maintenance and caregiving into sculptural structures that expose the tensions embedded within domestic life. Across works such as A Persistent Wound (2025), A Deep Wound (2024) and A Soft Word (2025), gestures of repetition and pressure become material metaphors for endurance, inheritance and the subtle violences embedded in routine. At the same time, the exhibition introduces care as a structural force, drawing on bell hooks’ conception of love as an active ethical practice.
By suspending the original function of these objects, Used reframes the everyday as a site of critical inquiry, where acts of maintenance and repetition reveal deeper histories of resilience, intimacy and resistance.