UPCOMING EXHIBITION

tugging at the seams

January 21, 2026 – February 25, 2026
Opening Reception: January 21, 6–8 pm

EFA Studios
323 West 39th St., New York, NY, 3rd Floor
Hours: Tue–Fri, 12–5 pm

AYDO (A young Yu & Nicholas Oh)
Liselot van der Heijden
Whitney Oldenburg
Bundith Phunsombatlert
Maria D. Rapicavoli
Yali Romagoza
Finnegan Shannon

Curated by Johanna Laub

EFA Gallery is pleased to present tugging at the seams, a group exhibition bringing together EFA Studio Members whose practices engage acts of repair, resistance, and reconfiguration in response to personal histories and broader structural conditions. 

Through sculpture, installation, photography, performance, text and moving image, the artists in the exhibition engage with and respond to states of breakdown, disintegration, displacement, and disruption. Rather than proposing repair as a return to wholeness, tugging at the seams approaches fragmentation as a generative condition—one that opens space for alternative forms of care, value, and belonging.

tugging at the seams features work by AYDO (A young Yu & Nicholas Oh), Liselot van der Heijden, Whitney Oldenburg, Bundith Phunsombatlert, Maria D. Rapicavoli, Yali Romagoza, and Finnegan Shannon. While each artist operates from a distinct position and methodology, their practices are united by an attention to the politics of (dis)repair—questioning who and what is deemed worthy of care, how histories persist in the present, and how change and reconnection might be reimagined through artistic practice.

The exhibition brings into dialogue artists whose work addresses material excess, disrupted geographies, hegemonic histories, the politics of access, and embodied trauma. Across diverse practices, the artists explore how inherited systems—colonial, economic, environmental, and social—are inscribed onto bodies, landscapes, and objects, and how those systems might be unraveled or reworked. Whether through speculative engagement with heritage, the transformation of archival remains and discarded material, or the exposure of latent temporalities and structures, the works presented here foreground repair as both a critical and restorative act.

The exhibition is curated by Johanna Laub, whose curatorial work and writing engages with artistic practices that critically examine epistemic politics and systems of power, especially in relation to heritage and history. With tugging at the seams, she continues her recent exploration of phenomena such as breakdown and entropy, as well as the artistic responses they engender.

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