“A garment, a pin, a seam, a shield” at Phillida Reid is a thoughtfully composed exhibition that attends to the afterlives — or the Warburgian Nachleben — of things: imprints, surfaces, stains, residues. Warburg’s notion describes the survival and reactivation of images, forms, or gestures across time, often re-emerging in unexpected contexts charged with psychic intensity. Here, that idea is transposed onto material traces: objects and surfaces carry with them a latent energy, a persistence that haunts the present. Across five artists and a range of media — found-object assemblage, photography, video, and sculptural painting — there is a sustained sensitivity to the affective charge of materials that have been worn, touched, handled, torn, pierced, or barely held together. The stain recurs as compositional logic. What is left behind becomes a way of thinking through trauma, memory, and embodiment. In Griselda Pollock’s terms, the works articulate the “after-image” – a lingering, fragmentary trace that resists resolution. The exhibition proposes a collective, mnemonic aesthetics of anti-monumentality.
One of the first encounters is with Liz Magor’s “Being This” (2012/2022), a series of assemblage boxes containing thrifted clothes, scrunched wrapping paper, cigarette butts, pink doll shoes, and other found or discarded objects. These works appear as tableaus of intimate residue. It’s difficult not to think of Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) — not only because of the cigarettes and traces of melancholic hedonism, but for the glimpse it offers into a private space and the narratives their residues invite us to imagine.
Yet unlike Emin, Magor’s focus is less confessional and more attuned to the quiet relationships between the materials themselves. The hidden lives of objects take center stage. There’s an interplay of material richness, tenderness, nostalgia, and unease – particularly in Being This (Alaric’s Boutique), in which a crowned eagle emblem is affixed to the chest of a cozy autumn jumper. This detail, later revealed as the Polish coat of arms, introduces a quiet disruption to the garment’s warmth, hinting at historical weight. That tension continues in Open and Closed (2018), a diptych of salvaged wool blankets wrapped in polyester foil and stained with reddish dyes. The foil evokes dry cleaning bags or forensic preservation, the stains heightened rather than obscured, as if amplifying the trace rather than erasing it. The fabric is burned through, each small hole haloed with pigment, blooming across the surface like a constellation of tender scars. Like ghostly, soft carcasses, these works hover between care and aftermath, preservation and exposure.
That same ambivalence carries into Joanna Piotrowska’s Untitled, a collage of silver gelatin hand prints (2024), hung beside Magor’s blankets. A woman’s back is gripped by another’s hands, fingers digging into thick fabric. At the center, a disembodied, expressionless face hovers like a ghost. This is in fact the face of Piotrowska’s mother, sourced from the artist’s father’s archive of negatives. The frame is overlaid with patterned fabric evoking nostalgia and feminine domesticity, punctured by a metal ring that echoes the clasping gesture in the image, registering an unresolved tension between care and intrusion.
This unease intensifies by Myriam Mihindou’s La robe envolée (2008–2009), a video playing opposite. In the video, the artist tears through a pair of tights stretched over her legs – as if peeling off her own skin. The gesture hovers between ritualistic release and self-harm. Here, the epidermis becomes a symbolic register for systems of oppression — patriarchy, colonialism, racism — violently, if not fully, cast off. Over the image, a voiceover in Spanish — written by the artist in the first person — meditates on the dilemma of the skin. The script ends on an unresolved note, addressing the impossibility of fully liberating oneself from the body despite the need to continue trying: “I have always opened the chrysalis… I have never seen the butterfly.” Placed in dialogue with Piotrowska’s photograph and Magor’s blankets, the work contributes to what Arthur Jafa calls “affective proximity” : a resonance that heightens the emotional and conceptual charge of neighboring works, felt throughout the exhibition.
Three works from Mihindou’s later “Le Patron” series (2022–24) are dispersed across the two floors, expanding the aesthetic of the stain. Sheets of silk and paper, soaked in tea and ink, are stitched with graphite and copper wire, then held together by pins, tape, and staples. The layered inscriptions — Latin and French phrases like “the inside of her pink hands,” “left hand, right hand,” and “it’s like boubous,” read as both diaristic and clinical. They suggest an ordered, even violated, body — made legible through the language of archive and anatomy. The paper sheets appear as flattened bodies or memory-containers, on the verge of collapse. Here, the stain becomes a form of inscription, a memory etched into the material itself, appearing as if cataloguing their own disintegration.
In contrast, Gray Wielebinski’s Tomb I and Tomb II (both 2025) in the second gallery present a more traditionally purist, opaque surface upon first encounter, but this restrained minimalist strategy is deceptive. Each panel, cast in silicon carbide from bulletproof vests — one black, one white, retaining the original color of the tiles — is framed in custom black-stained wood. Matte, gridded, and sealed, the works recall gravestones, armor, or ceremonial plaques: formal abstraction standing in for an absent or threatened body. Silicon carbide, used in military and nuclear contexts for its resistance to heat and force, sharpens the tension between protection and latent violence. These are surfaces bracing for impact, imbued with a kind of apocalyptic paranoia that echoes Wielebinski’s ICA exhibition from last year that explored similar themes. Positioned opposite Proof (2025) — a larger panel from the same series — and Cartridge (2025), a photographic print of an exploded shell casing, the grouping maps a choreography of authority, containment, trauma, and spectacle. There’s a seductive severity to these works, but it gives way to theatricality — staging a binary logic of good and evil, defense and offense — that echoes the moral cosmology of American exceptionalism, a recurring concern in Wielebinski’s practice. The shield here is a kind of symbolic costume — a performance of both protection and aggression — for the dual role the US has historically assumed on the global stage and within its own mythology. This constellation reflects a culture historically saturated with gun violence and militarism, where the aesthetics of defense are inseparable from systems of force.
Nearby, two works from Vivian Lynn’s “Mind Field” (2007) series take up the motif of the shield — though theirs are more explicitly biomorphic, recalling leaves or lungs in form. Aluminum panels are layered with creased Gampi paper, pigment, and symmetrical, inkblot-like cutouts. Veined with red, translucent streaks that resemble burst capillaries or psychic wounds, the surfaces form a kind of somatic-psychic map. One panel features Rorschach-like icons; another, a yellowish slit down the center, suggesting an orifice — vaginal, respiratory, or psychic — opening into an interior. Beneath the surface, strands of hair twist as physical residues of the body. Like Wielebinski’s diptych, Lynn’s works negotiate the aesthetics of the grid — a symbol of authority, order, and canon — by allowing the stained body and unruly consciousness to seep across and expand beyond it.
One of the most affecting works is Mihindou’s early video Folle (2000), tucked away downstairs and played on a screen on the floor — positioning the viewer in a voyeuristic stance that feels both dominant and disconcertingly intimate. Her feet circle, scrape, and hesitate at the crack between paving stones, accompanied by a loop of manic laughter that rises, ebbs, and builds again. The repetition produces a sense of claustrophobia; the crack becomes charged, visceral — standing in for a wound, a psychic or bodily split. Her movements — tentative, obsessive, unresolved — escalate until she finally steps across. But the white dust clings, as transgression leaves its mark. The body here is not merely present but a site of inscription. As we look down, we become part of the scene: implicated, infected by the gesture’s compulsive rhythm, evoking a kind of affective contagion or mirroring effect— a quiet choreography of discomfort.
What brings all these works together is a shared grammar of Nachleben, or psychic residue: the imprint, the stain, the mark that resists resolution. An attentiveness to vulnerability, exposure, and the affective traces of violence — whether intimate, systemic, or ideological — runs throughout the exhibition, alongside a search for possible methodologies of healing and repair. It is in this poetics of the after-effect that “A garment, a pin, a seam, a shield” finds its critical register: where care and harm remain entangled, and the past refuses resolution, insisting instead on a presence in the Now.
