RESERVOIR presents GENESIS, We Were Trying To Build A Home – a solo exhibition by South African artist, Mikhailia Petersen (b. 1992, Cape Town), featuring a new body of photographic works, the artist’s first video work, and an installation at KIOSK by RESERVOIR, the gallery’s street-facing exhibition window. This marks the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition explores displacement, inheritance, identity and belonging through Petersen’s deeply personal engagement with family memory and South African histories of colonialism, specifically the forced displacements of apartheid-era Cape Town. Through this exhibition, Petersen uses her own body as both subject and site, confronting the experiences inherited across generations.

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The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Koleka Putuma:

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What holds poetry together in this city, what holds me together. 

[Genesis - we were trying to build a home / reflection]

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Click here to read the text