Used by Usha Seejarim at Southern Guild is a meditation on gender, labour and power

Southern Guild gallery presents Used, a solo exhibition by Usha Seejarim as part of their new permanent gallery in Tribeca, New York. On view from April 23 – May 16, 2026, the art exhibition is the Johannesburg-based conceptual artist’s first solo show in the United States and her second with the gallery. Used brings together sculptural and wall-based works that extend the South African artist’s three-decade-long investigation into gender, labour and power through the use of repurposed domestic materials. “Domestic work, historically rendered invisible and feminised, is repositioned here as both subject and structure within broader social and gendered economies,” Southern Guild notes in an official release.

Drawing inspiration from writer and scholar Sara Ahmed’s reflections on ‘use’, the contemporary art exhibition examines the domestic sphere “as a site where labour, intimacy and social expectations converge,” the art gallery notes.

Throughout the exhibition, the grid emerges as both a compositional structure and a conceptual framework. Historically associated with order, discipline and control, the grid in Seejarim’s work becomes unstable through subtle disruptions. In works such as A Persistent Wound (2025) and A Deep Wound (2024), dense surfaces composed of wooden clothespins are interrupted by gestural marks resembling scars, threads or veins. Further in A Small Crease (2025), “stacked iron soleplates are configured into a monumental wall-based structure that exaggerates the very imperfection irons are designed to eliminate. The crease becomes a record of repeated pressure: a material archive of labour and accommodation,” the art gallery explains. 

Used also builds on concerns explored in the contemporary artist’s Servitude series (2020 – 2025), in which serving trays, irons and other domestic implements are transformed into abstract assemblages that interrogate service, containment and gendered power structures. “The polished silver trays are layered, slit and folded to evoke vulvic forms, collapsing associations between caregiving and the regulation of the female body while exposing the violence embedded in systems of service structured through obligation and control,” the gallery continues. “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,” the gallery explains.

In A Lingering Kiss (2025) and A Soft Word (2026), components of ironing soleplates are assembled into abstract forms that evoke tenderness and intimacy despite their cold metallic surfaces. Here, softness exists alongside labour rather than in opposition to it, thereby proposing gentleness as politically charged.

“Used repositions the domestic sphere as central terrain through which social relations are produced and sustained, reframing everyday repetition not as a passive condition but as a site of critical inquiry, ethical attention and quiet resistance,” Southen Guild shares.