From the civic landscape of Bremen to the permanent collection of a US museum, Usha Seejarim’s work is entering new institutional contexts at a significant moment in her three-decade career. This September saw the inauguration of Force – Death by Drowning, a major permanent public memorial in Bremen, accompanied by a solo exhibition at the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus. The project coincides with the North Dakota Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of her work and its inclusion in a group exhibition, marking a growing international institutional presence for the South African conceptual artist.

Known for transforming ordinary domestic materials into sculptural forms, Seejarim has consistently looked to objects and their uses as a means of making larger social forces tangible. In Bremen, that enquiry takes on a new scale, permanence and public significance.

On 26 September 2026, Seejarim’s permanent public artwork Force – Death by Drowning was inaugurated alongside the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus in Bremen’s Ostertor district. Conceived in response to a public-art competition in 2023, the memorial commemorates victims of a coercive practice formerly used by Bremen police, in which emetics were forcibly administered to people suspected of concealing drugs. The work pays particular tribute to Laye-Alama Condé, an asylum seeker from Sierra Leone who died in January 2005 after being subjected to the procedure while in police custody.

Its permanence is significant. Death by Drowning does not simply enter Bremen temporarily as part of an exhibition; it becomes embedded within the city in which the history it addresses took place. Seejarim conceived the memorial to be visible and accessible to passers-by and to encourage continued conversation around anti-Black racism, state violence and human rights. The work extends her ongoing enquiry into how objects acquire meaning through use into a new register, asking what a public artwork might hold over time and how memorialisation can keep difficult histories present.

Coinciding with the memorial’s inauguration, the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus is presenting Life Force, a solo cabinet exhibition of Seejarim’s works on paper, on view until 14 February 2027. The simultaneous presentation places two aspects of her practice in dialogue: a permanent intervention within the civic landscape and a more intimate encounter with her work within the museum.

The Bremen project comes amid growing institutional recognition for Seejarim internationally. Earlier this year, her sculpture Centrefold (2026) was acquired for the permanent collection of the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. Constructed from wooden clothes pegs, wire and steel, the work was first presented in Used, Seejarim’s second solo exhibition with Southern Guild and her US solo debut, which inaugurated the gallery’s permanent New York space in Tribeca in April.

Centrefold is currently on view at the museum in Material Abstractions, a group exhibition bringing together 24 artists and challenging conventional Western narratives around the development of abstraction. The exhibition considers how materials carry their own histories, cultural associations and personal meanings. In Seejarim’s work, the familiar clothes peg retains its associations with domesticity and feminised labour even as repetition and scale transform it into an imposing abstract form. The exhibition remains on view until 4 October 2026.

The acquisition brings the material language Seejarim has developed over decades into a new institutional context. Across Used, clothes pegs, reclaimed iron soleplates, and other familiar domestic materials became sculptural forms through which she examined repetition, care and endurance. Removed from their prescribed functions, objects associated with maintenance and domestic labour become vehicles for considering larger structures of gender and power. Their entry into a US museum collection extends both the reach of this language and its place within broader conversations around abstraction and material histories.

This period has also brought a milestone of a different kind. Seejarim recently graduated with a Master of Business Administration from Henley Business School, University of Reading. The degree sits alongside her B Tech Honours in Fine Art from the University of Johannesburg and MFA from the University of the Witwatersrand, reflecting an expanding engagement with the economic and organisational structures within which artists and cultural practitioners operate.

This engagement extends into academia through Seejarim’s role as Visiting Professor of Practice with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. The position creates another context for the knowledge accumulated through more than three decades as a practising artist, extending her contribution beyond the production and exhibition of artworks into mentorship, research and dialogue around contemporary artistic practice.

Across these contexts, Seejarim continues to extend her longstanding enquiries into labour, power and human experience. Death by Drowning brings these concerns into the terrain of public memory, building on her established engagement with public art. Permanently embedded within Bremen and the history it addresses, the memorial asks what a public object can hold: the memory of an individual life, a history of violence, and an invitation to sit with a history that cannot – and should not – be made comfortable.