I Can’t Believe We’re Still Protesting This!

Natasja van Wyk - Nicole Kemp - Kelly Sullivan - Empire of Stuff - Anonymous contributors

I Can’t Believe We're Still Protesting This! brings together four artists whose practices examine the repeated return of political and social conditions that should already be behind us.

Moving across textile, pattern, assemblage, repetition, and material tension, the exhibition considers protest not simply as a public event or symbolic gesture, but as an ongoing lived condition.At the core of the exhibition is the idea of repetition: repeated histories, repeated systems of power, repeated violences, repeated cultural pressures, and the repeated exhaustion of having to resist what should no longer need resisting. Feminism, war, political regression, consumer culture, and structural inequality all sit within this field. Rather than isolating these concerns into separate categories, the exhibition explores the ways they overlap and reappear through everyday life, through inherited structures, and through material experience.

Across the exhibition, familiar forms and surfaces become unsettled. Pattern, cloth, decoration, accumulation, and domestic materials are transformed into sites of tension, critique, endurance, and refusal. Beauty is not treated as separate from politics, but as one of the ways power is carried, softened, normalised, or resisted. The works ask how bodies, homes, labour, memory, and objects absorb and reflect broader social realities.

The exhibition invites audiences not only to view the work, but to recognise themselves within it: in the fatigue, disbelief, grief, anger, and persistence of continuing to resist what should already be resolved in 2026.

Each artist brings a distinct perspective to these concerns, yet together their practices form a conversation about containment and rupture, visibility and erasure, care and conflict, surface and depth. Some works speak in quiet, intimate registers. Others are sharper, more confrontational, or more overtly political. What unites them is a shared attention to the material and emotional weight of living through unresolved struggle.

Rather than presenting protest as spectacle, I Can’t Believe We're Still Protesting This! reflects on the fatigue, disbelief, and persistence that accompany repeated resistance. It asks what it means to continue making, speaking, and refusing within conditions that remain stubbornly unresolved. In doing so, the exhibition creates a space for both frustration and defiance, recognising protest not only as opposition, but as a way of enduring, witnessing, and insisting otherwise.