Karyn Olivier reflects on absence, monumentality, and the restless material lives of objects in ‘Bend, Break, Mend’, where sculpture becomes a way of navigating historical rupture, collective memory, and the unfinished work of repair.
5 August 2026
In ‘Bend, Break, Mend’, Karyn Olivier transforms found materials, overlooked landscapes, and everyday objects into poetic meditations on history’s fractures and afterlives. Her practice resists fixed narratives, instead revealing how memory is shaped through accumulation, omission, displacement, and continual reinterpretation. Drawing on personal experience, diasporic histories, and the politics of public space, Olivier invites viewers to attend to what has been silenced as much as to what remains visible. In this conversation, she discusses the productive tension between rupture and repair, the generative power of “amplified absences,” and why monuments need not be permanent to carry enduring meaning. As ‘Bend, Break, Mend’ opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Olivier reflects on art’s capacity to reimagine remembrance and to ask difficult questions that continue long after the viewer leaves the gallery.
Brendon Bell-Roberts: The title ‘Bend, Break, Mend’ suggests rupture and repair. How do you see these actions as interconnected in your practice, especially in relation to unresolved histories?
Karyn Olivier: I am interested in the interconnectivity, the cause and effect, and the interdependence that is implied in those three words. I’m excited by the inherent expansiveness of their meanings, their potential functions as both nouns and verbs. Each word carries literal, physical (labour), psychological, mental, and emotive import. They can each hold universal and individual metaphoric weight. Their narrative possibilities might engage us to consider the past, present, and future (Why is “it” bending? Was it subject to an interior or exterior force? When did bending become breaking? Are there ways to repair?) The gap (i.e. narrative/action) between the words bend, break, mend (i.e. the physical time between when bending leads to a break, and a break is eventually mended) holds tension, uncertainty, transformation. Words like accumulation, compression, gravity, and collapse are in the same orbit as the words bend, break, mend for me. These words can describe and be applied to my ways of making art, as well as the manner in which I wrestle with the collective, layered and individual histories of life, which are never simple. There is always irresolution with histories; we can only attempt to reconcile these pasts and their aftermaths.
Throughout your work, you have spoken about “amplified absences.” What draws you to spaces where history seems silent, and how do you make those absences materially present without resolving them?
These spaces where history seems silent—they are found everywhere and are not anomalies. I’m acutely aware that our histories are always present in some manifestation, though often unrecognised by Western narrative or power structures.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot spoke about selective silencing and how (dominant/mainstream narrative) history is produced through collective silencing. But those silenced, be it the poor, the Global Majority, women—cannot be truly erased or disappeared. I am drawn to amplifying these absences in part because of an innate knowing that they are in fact concrete and real, though at times, indiscernible. But we can conjure, and perhaps instinctively be attuned to their presence; they are indelibly felt and embodied even when “unseen.” Any material—or object, person, sound, site, etc.—can become a surrogate for what’s missing, hidden or “lost”. These can become carriers, offering a corrective, a new understanding, or a previously unimaginable possibility. Absence is never truly empty—something always fills it; something is always there. I believe the most honest place for me to create is from a place of restlessness. I see my role as proposing questions for whoever is willing to engage, wrestle, and dream with me—I am always asking “what if?”
Your sculptures often transform found materials that carry traces of previous lives. What do these objects offer that new materials cannot, especially when considering memory, displacement, and survival?
I am invested in the rich histories of discarded materials. This interest is predicated on uncovering and dissecting the prescribed uses and functions of cast-off matter—i.e. why they were initially created, designed, developed, fabricated?—their ways of being before discard, before my discovery and recovery of them. Materials (and objects) wear their journeys.
Their experiences are physically embedded, easily read on their “skin”. Say you spot a well-worn single sneaker on the sidewalk. It’s hard not to think of context for how it may have ended there—Who did it belong to? In what part of town did it live and travel? Was the person wearing this running or fleeing? Was it tossed as trash? Where is its mate? Inherent in many materials (and the photographs I make) are themes of movement, displacement, migration, instability, precarity, portability, provisionality, and mutability. I gave a talk a few years ago and a grad student (Yohana Ansari-Thomas) commented perceptively on the role of found materials in my work saying “The material politics exist as both evidence of and witness to histories of bodily and earthly violence, and in layering these many histories, an erased voice, the subject left out from record, faintly emerges at the moment before an utterance. How will they speak? What will they say?” For example, in the sculpture How Many Ways Can You Disappear, fishing lines I recovered from the shoreline of a remote island off the coast of North America lay limp, without function, but still held the sea—history, memories, loss. The evaporated seawater embedded in the fishing lines was now turned to crystallised salt. Though they were depleted and in a sense “useless,” I attempted to point to the long and complex history of salt through this sculpture—as currency in trade, the practice of trading enslaved people for salt in Ancient Greece, and unavoidably, this led me to other journeys on the sea— from the Middle Passage to the refugee and migrant crises. The intentional use of found materials offers other opportunities and aspirations—a chance to rediscover meanings through a new perspective that frees up its purposes and meanings. For example, in Trinidad, the empty asphalt-paved parking lot at night may “host” a fete; the concrete highway divider/barrier doubles as a fruit stand in early evening traffic; the exposed aggregate concrete sidewalk is the display case for your wares for sale. This happens throughout the Caribbean (and in many parts of the world) and in the US somewhat, but it’s not as embedded in mainstream American culture. I think of the most basic objects universally found in a home—say, a chair. Of course it’s used to sit on, but in a pinch, it’s a ladder, or a table for your dinner plate if you don’t have one. Not one thing is wasted or squandered—a necessity, culturally embedded. Carnival is an important reference for me. In Trinidad, the robust participation (and co-opting) of carnival for Black folks started after emancipation in 1834. It was this (physical and psychological) space for subverting, taking the everyday and inverting structures of hierarchy. The traditional carnival character still played today—the Dame Lorraine—uses simple materials of leftover fabric and padding to create a costume that satirises the 18th and 19th-century French aristocracy and plantation elite. You don’t need much to completely transform who you are. The transformation won’t last forever (it’s a two-day celebration), but it allows an opening and a new lens through which we can interrogate the status quo.
This exhibition considers how historical narratives are constructed, omitted, and reshaped. How do you hope visitors will reconsider the stories embedded in the landscapes and monuments they encounter every day?
In many ways, my approach to art (and life in general) is quite simple—I pay attention, attune myself to what is there, which leads me to ponder how it came to be there? What was there before? What should be there? What is missing? I engage these queries intellectually, physically, emotionally, socially and psychologically and hope visitors will perhaps be made more attentive to the spaces, materials and objects around them—I find them thrilling, and rife with possibilities—the discarded blind spots, the periphery, the unfixed, the restless. I am drawn to these margins (bell hooks often spoke about the radical freedom and power that exist in the margins). My works are empathic attempts to confront and feel my way through the complexity of living/being an immigrant Black woman who has committed five-plus decades to making North America home. For each of us, our story is embedded in the landscape—it is here even if on first encounter we don’t see it. Our stories exist as evidence and counter-evidence. When we pay attention and spotlight ourselves in the past, we insist on our part in the historical narrative.
Your practice frequently questions who is commemorated and who remains invisible in public space. In a moment when monuments are debated around the world, what role can artists play in reimagining remembrance?
I think one of the things artists do best is creating fictions that tell truths. Artists (and I strive to do this in my work) are well equipped to interrogate and intersect disparate histories with present-day narratives, occurrences and circumstances. Our artworks, in a sense, are propositions for the future that use the past and present as our touchstones. My work attempts to translate and transform historical research using familiar objects and places to disrupt conventional perceptions and assumptions. In my work, I’m trying to engage with multiple histories to reveal the fragmentary manner in which we learn about the past, and the impossibility of a universal or “objective” history. I believe we need to rethink what permanence could mean in relationship to monuments, commemorative symbols and historical markers. Monumentality’s (i.e. physical heft, scale) role in commemoration should be upended—notions of material weightiness and fixity should be dislodged. Monuments can take the form of a gesture, an event, perhaps a talisman that is carried. In my practice, I create both temporary and permanent memorials and monuments. In an exhibition at the ICA in Philadelphia, carnation corsage pins were offered to museumgoers instead of the conventional metal pins at the museum’s entrance. This simple act was an attempt to acknowledge MOVE, a Black liberation group founded in Philadelphia in 1972. On May 12, 1985, which was Mother’s Day that year, the Philadelphia Police issued eviction and arrest warrants to MOVE, and instructed those living in the vicinity to vacate their home until the following evening. A stand-off ensued, and a police helicopter dropped a bomb on the MOVE compound. Eleven MOVE members were murdered, including five children. I was interested in what it could symbolise to offer these carnations to every visitor (the flower was an early symbol of the founding of Mother’s Day in the US), and through this collective act of wearing or holding the corsage, form a temporary physical community in the museum that later disperses throughout the city and beyond. I wanted to create a monument that would have an intimate and mobile relationship to the body, and in this act, invert a typical monument’s presumed scale and fixity. In my memorial and monument work, I try to counter a single perspective with one that’s complex and sometimes messy —reflecting our histories, I believe, in a more honest way. I reinterpret the status quo and presumptions of who should be honoured (i.e. The Battle is Joined), and seek to reimagine the givens, that which is assumed to be universally accepted. I attempt to rearticulate these objects/sites as a way to declare presence, allowing the public to claim, reclaim or define a site in a new way.
Scale and spatial intervention are central to your installations. How do shifts in physical experience shape the emotional and political relationship between viewer, artwork, and the histories it evokes?
As artists, we remix, invert, subvert, abstract, fracture, fragment, translate, transform, spotlight, manipulate, embellish, and on and on… When employing these seemingly limitless possibilities, my priority always is to create work that the viewer feels first; then, engage the work from an intellectual perspective. My hope is for the scale shifts, disparate material combinations, and contextual framing decisions to allow for an embodied experience with the work. With an embodied approach, the delineation between the self and spaces—objects, environments, people, and situations—is ruptured. Because things are more immediately felt, the hope is that the consequences matter more, the stakes feel higher and more personal. This embodied approach to art engagement is how I try to move through the world, informing how I engage the social and political.
Image credit: Pierre Le Hors.
Rather than presenting memory as fixed, ‘Bend, Break, Mend’ suggests it is constantly evolving. How has your understanding of memory changed while developing this exhibition?
Memory is filled with inventions and reimaginings. Memory is active and alive, so of course it shifts, expands, and mutates just as we do. I think of my work at times as reenactments—remixing, reconsidering, replaying the past with a gaze to the future—the thought ever on my mind: what if? I also think of the work as an attempt to dislodge the familiar—be it objects, scenes, assumptions. In this exhibition, the sculpture Shelter uses two materials—expired asphalt roofing and new emergency blankets, which are bolted together with threaded rods. This piece points to current world crises (i.e. the displacement crisis in Sudan; the daily images of destruction from the genocide in Gaza). It also points to our contribution to the climate crisis through the relentless demolition and problematic construction methods rampant in the United States, and to a lesser degree, the world. I think about asphalt’s geological millennia as bitumen, before being harvested and refined for use in our built environments. I also recall my childhood experiences each summer at Pitch Lake in Trinidad—the largest natural deposit of bitumen in the world. I remember the strange physical sensation of walking across the lake and the stories of trapped animals, fossilised evidence of the lake’s shifting surface from solid to viscous. There is this toggle between continuity and discontinuity with our present and past that I find confounding.
The exhibition invites collective reflection rather than offering definitive conclusions. What conversations or questions do you hope audiences carry after leaving the gallery?
The best hope is for the work to serve as a catalyst or a tool—to stir discernment, instigate a reaction, and invite new awareness. This awareness can take many forms— reflection, surprise, empathy—but mostly I hope it can elicit in each of us an acute recognition of our aliveness/presentness. I want the work to be a site for discourse, where disparate conversations can evolve. In many ways my practice is an attempt to “use what’s right in front of me”—a playground slide, chairs that have lost their legs, expired roofing, discarded clothing, a tossed-out bathroom floor, etc.—and acknowledge their potential, or more accurately their inherent profundity.
This exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit from 8 August until 11 October 2026.
