Deborah Roberts' 'Consequences of Being' at The FLAG Art Foundation explores identity through collage and ceramics

Deborah Roberts presents new works at The FLAG Art Foundation in an exhibition titled 'Consequences of Being,' running from February 12 to April 25, 2026. The show features large-scale paintings, works on paper, and marks her first venture into ceramic sculpture, expanding her material practice. Roberts' composite figures, assembled from fragments, challenge coherent identity and emphasize multiplicity in Black subjecthood. Her subjects, often children, navigate spaces between vulnerability and defiance, confronting the politics of the gaze. The works draw from archival imagery and vernacular signage to trace colonial legacies shaping perception across South Africa, Europe, and the United States. The exhibition stages an ongoing reckoning with how bodies are constructed and reclaimed, resisting resolution. Roberts' practice, rooted in collage, explores the unstable architectures of identity through visual dissonance. The act of looking is presented as never neutral in this charged field of visibility.