Southern Guild
13.03 - 15.05.2025
Usha Seejarim’s latest solo exhibition, ‘Unfolding Servitude’, currently on show at Southern Guild in Cape Town, is an intensive interrogation of domesticity, gender roles, and the quiet, often invisible labour that defines everyday feminine existence. Known for her ability to transform mundane household objects into deeply conceptual sculptural assemblages, Seejarim continues her exploration of expectation, obligation, and power dynamics within the home.
At the heart of ‘Unfolding Servitude’ is Seejarim’s ongoing engagement with materials associated with domestic labour—serving trays, ironing soleplates, and wooden pegs—reimagined into abstracted forms that challenge their conventional functions. This subversion of the utilitarian is central to her practice. By stripping these objects of their intended use, she invites the viewer to relook, reinterpret and reassess their symbolic weight, asking: Who serves? Who is served? And at what cost?
One of the exhibition’s most striking aspects is the artist’s use of repetition and multiplicity. Hundreds, if not thousands of identical unassuming objects are assembled together, creating rhythmic, almost meditative compositions. Her work recontextualises the wooden peg into symbols of domestic labour—mimicking the folds of fabric, evoking both softness and rigidity. Similarly, the metallic sheen of serving trays is fashioned into yonic shapes, which serve as commentaries on gender, power, and the intimate politics of care and neglect.
Usha Seejarim, Skroplap, 2024. Wooden clothes pegs, wire, steel. Courtesy of Southern Guild.
The reoccurrence of the vulvic form as a motif in Seejarim’s work can be seen as a deliberate act of reclaiming female agency and unsettling social taboos surrounding the representation of the female body. Here, it emerges beyond being a symbol of procreation to becoming a marker of artistic protest and resistance against servitude, erasure and imposed gendered expectations.
The exhibition’s title, ‘Unfolding Servitude’, presents itself in a multitude of ways. Conceptually, it alludes to an unraveling—a search for meaning, a peeling back of the layers of domestic labour to expose the tensions between care and obligation, love and duty. Formally, it speaks to the physical folds within the work, from the sculpted metallic trays to the intricate paper-like constructions of ironing soleplates transformed into over 900 delicate lilies.
Usha Seejarim, A Bouquet of Mother’s Milk, 2023. Iron soleplates, steel. Courtesy of Southern Guild.
The duality which she constructs through the manipulation of materiality and meaning is a defining feature of Seejarim’s approach to art-making. Her intuitive process is a form of “play” that allows materials to dictate their own narratives. The works on display are the result of this instinctual engagement—a balance between spontaneity and precision, chaos and control. This is exemplified in Bouquet of mother’s milk – an installation created from over 900 irons, where the bases of each were flattened and crafted into lilies. This particular work took a team of four and six months to create. The work speaks to the Greek mythology behind Hercules’ birth, relating to the affair Zeus had with a mortal. It is said that once the half god child was born, Zeus left Hera, his wife and sister, with the child. Hera was so taken by the baby that she began to lactate – her milk falling from the heavens and landing on Earth, creating lilies.
Usha Seejarim, Primal Power, 2025. Serving trays, iron soleplates, found objects. Courtesy of Southern Guild.
Beyond material concerns, Seejarim’s work is deeply rooted in feminist discourse. She draws inspiration from foundational feminist texts such as Silvia Federici’s ‘Wages Against Housework’ (1975) and Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s ‘Women and the Subversion of the Community’ (1972), both of which critique the unpaid, unrecognised labour of women in the domestic sphere. The influence of these writings is evident in Seejarim’s interrogation of servitude, not just as a physical act but as a social construct that dictates power hierarchies within the home. This sentiment is articulated in the artist’s fashioning of the serving trays, which she morphs into forms which simultaneously allude to the domestic through the material used, as well as sexual expectations thrust upon women, communicated through the yonic forms each tray takes on.
‘Unfolding Servitude’ is a multifaceted presentation of the manipulation of materiality, recreation of form, and conceptual thought. Seejarim’s ability to transform the familiar into the profound is what makes her one of the most exciting contemporary artists working today. The exhibition is more than a mere visual experience, it is a conversation, confrontation, and an invitation to reconsider that which society deems as women’s work within the structures of our daily lives.
Usha Seejarim, Sticky Dicks, 2019. Serving tray, broom handles, found objects. Courtesy of Southern Guild.
