Often understood as devices or implements-objects forged, carved, or engineered for a singular purpose. Yet when we think beyond their physical form, a tool can also be understood as an extension of the body: an external ligament that supports, shields, disrupts, or propels us toward transformation and change. Tools mediate our relationship to the world; they shape how we act, remember, build, and resist.

TOOLS is a multidisciplinary exhibition that explores how artists reinterpret and unearth tools as strategies for survival, self-definition, and subversion. Through lived experience, speculative worlds, and embodied practice, the works propose tools for holding memory, disrupting imposed narratives, and imagining alternate temporalities. Together, they ask not only how tools function, but what kinds of futures they make possible.

Across sound, performance, sculpture, moving image, and installation, the artists in TOOLS reimagine tools not as neutral instruments, but as objects shaped by power, history, and use. The exhibition brings together practices that engage with ancestral and contemporary tool-making; from sonic archives and ritualised performance to speculative wearable forms and fabulated artefacts questioning identity, diaspora, gender, trauma, and memory.

FEATURED ARTISTS:

ELLA WANENDEYA

FI SONOLA

KIALY TIHNGANG