Deborah Roberts and the politics of looking, remembering, and reassembling.
14 April 2026
At The FLAG Art Foundation, ‘Consequences of Being’ gathers Deborah Roberts’s newest works into a charged field of visibility, where the act of looking is never neutral. Spanning large-scale paintings, works on paper, and the artist’s first foray into ceramic sculpture, the exhibition marks both a material and conceptual expansion of a practice rooted in collage and the unstable architectures of identity.
Roberts’s figures emerge as composite bodies, assembled from fragments that refuse coherence. In their dissonance lies a quiet insistence on multiplicity, where Black subjecthood is not fixed but continually negotiated against the weight of history. Drawing on visual languages that range from archival imagery to vernacular signage, the works trace how colonial legacies continue to shape perception, consumption, and selfhood across geographies, including South Africa, Europe, and the United States.
There is a particular urgency in Roberts’s attention to the politics of the gaze. Her subjects, often children, occupy a tense space between vulnerability and defiance, confronting viewers with the inherited conditions of being seen and mis-seen. In this, ‘Consequences of being’ resists resolution, instead staging an ongoing reckoning with how bodies are constructed, circulated, and ultimately reclaimed.
This exhibition is on view at the Flag Art Foundation from February 12 to April 25, 2026.
