The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation at The 8th Floor Announces An Inherent Undoing Curated by Dr. Gervais Marsh
The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation at The 8th Floor Announces
An Inherent Undoing
Curated by Dr. Gervais Marsh
NIC Kay, pushit, an exercise in getting well soon!!, 2019.
Photo documentation from performance. Courtesy of the artist.
The 8th Floor
17 W 17 St, NYC
March 12 – June 6, 2026
New York, NY, February 12, 2026 – The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation is pleased to present An Inherent Undoing, a new group exhibition curated by Dr. Gervais Marsh at The 8th Floor opening on March 12 and on view through June 6, 2026. Through installation, video, and photography, the exhibition brings together artists who complicate the potential for reconciliation and engage the limits of repair amidst societal fractures and structural violence. Artists include Kearra Amaya Gopee, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, kimi malka hanauer, Regina José Galindo, NIC Kay, New Red Order, Josephine Sales, and Zaina Zarour & Faris Shomali.
The exhibition meditates on the shortcomings of resolution, interrogating the concept of coherency as a tool of control and questioning governmental attempts at atonement for state-sanctioned brutality. The artists linger in the friction between “inherent” and “undoing,” the two words eroding against each other. As Marsh writes: “An Inherent Undoing is a continuous reckoning with structures and histories of harm, holding the acute awareness that repair is a fraught concept. Progress often demands the flattening of the complex persistence of violence, both exceptional and mundane, in everyday life. If cracks extend to the profound depths of society’s core, stemming from a foundational rupture, then is repair possible without a structural undoing?”
What remains in spite of the relentless, shape-shifting devastation of imperialism, determined to erase people, places, and ways of being that do not feed into its swelling hunger? The ending is not an end, it is not a finality, but an iteration of a world that will find other manifestations. The artists in An Inherent Undoing understand that archives are incomplete and ever-growing, formed in the fissures of loss, in the glimpses and traces that carry critical information from the voices of those who have been dismissed.
How many times does an apology need to be uttered before it fails to register even as a performative act? What else can exist beside the imperative to repair? Can there be political potency channeled through despair and destruction? The artists grapple with the pervasive logics of anti-Blackness and transphobia as well as the ongoing genocide and settler colonialism from Indigenous communities across Turtle Island, to Palestine, and to Guatemala. They complicate temporalities of care and the surveillance of incarceration, while approaching disability as central in expanding relational capacity. An Inherent Undoing contends with a radically broken world, while also recognizing that this is not the totality of the lives we create and the communities we build.
For Dr. Marsh’s introductory notes on the artists and works in the exhibition, please navigate here.
An Inherent Undoing is the result of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation’s fourth Curatorial Open Call. The Foundation’s curatorial team selected Marsh’s proposal from a competitive pool of applications and is supporting their administrative and promotional endeavors, as well as associated public programs, which will be announced soon.
About Dr. Gervais Marsh
Dr. Gervais Marsh is a writer, curator and scholar from Kingston, Jamaica, whose practice meditates on questions of relation, intimacy, and the difficulties of reconciliation. They are an Associate Curator at Creative Time, guided by a desire to foster emotional resonances through public art and programming, exhibition making, and essays, while thinking alongside artists across all mediums. With a commitment to citation influenced by Black Feminisms, they believe that knowledge is created collectively, and lean into the vulnerability of uncertainty, recognizing that not everything can be known. Marsh seeks to ignite ongoing reflection rather than definitive answers and prioritizes listening, introspection and thoughtful dialogue as critical to intentional study.
They received a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and are an alumna of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Marsh’s writing has been published widely in artist monographs, exhibition catalogs and arts journals, including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Brooklyn Rail, Momus, ARTS.BLACK, Hyperallergic, and The Financial Times. They teach courses at the intersections of Black Feminisms, Performance Studies, Queer Theory, Visual Culture and Caribbean Studies.
About the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation
The Foundation believes in art as a cornerstone of cohesive, sustainable communities and greater participation in civic life. In its mission to make art available to the broader public, in particular to underserved communities, the Foundation provides direct support to, and facilitates partnerships between, cultural organizations and advocates of social justice across the public and private sectors. Through grantmaking, the Foundation supported cross-disciplinary work connecting art with social justice via experimental collaborations, as well as extending cultural resources to organizations and areas of New York City in need. sdrubin.org
About The 8th Floor
The 8th Floor is an independent exhibition and event space established in 2010 by Shelley and Donald Rubin to promote artistic and cultural initiatives. Inspired by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, the gallery is committed to broadening the access and availability of art to New York audiences. Seeking further cultural exchange, The 8th Floor explores the potential of art as an instrument for social change in the 21st century, through an annual program of innovative contemporary art exhibitions and an events program comprised of performances, salon-style discussions, and those organized by external partners. the8thfloor.org
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For media inquiries, please contact: Max Kruger-Dull, max@bluemedium.com 212.675.1800
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