Goodman Gallery presents 'The weight of a nail', Ravelle Pillay’s first large-scale solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring a new series of paintings, the show offers a response to the artist’s investigation of her family’s history, oral histories and their relationships to the lush, haunted landscapes of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Creeping through and haunting these works are the lingering shadows of nationhood, heritage and the cycles of oppression experienced by generations of people across space and time, whose lives have been circumscribed by the dark, overt or barely noticeable incursions of colonialism.
The weight of a nail continues her interrogation of colonial legacies and migration and her exploration of what and how we remember. In this body of work, colonial notions of nation converge with stories of individual family members and the dispossession of a family home. Depictions of statues, the Durban botanical gardens, and architectural sites of imagined or reconstructed generational memory, are counterpointed with landscapes dense with vegetation, bodies of water and distinctively coloured compositions inspired by intimate family recollections as they collide with ‘official’ Historic narrative.
Born in France to Algerian parents, before relocating to London in the mid 1980s, Sedira’s practice has been significantly shaped by her personal experience and multi-hyphenated identity. Key areas of investigation in her practice centre around location, materials and migration; deploying the archive as a primary tool with which to expose persisting struggles of a fading past and to question readily accepted narratives.
Central to the exhibition is an image of the interior of Pillay’s great-grandfather’s house looking outward to what would be a garden. This house, referred to by her family and the surrounding community as ‘the Castle’, and the land on which it stands was taken from her family under apartheid’s forced removals. The blue and grey tones in the painting, coupled with the now empty, dilapidated appearance of the home invoke the ghostly residue of the past and the cyclical nature of the trauma inflicted upon families by the quiet violence of the cold indifference and bureaucracy of racist policies that, in addition to financially destabilizing generations of people, obscure and sometimes erase a sense of history, personhood, or pride.
Artworks
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Across the exhibition generational memory confronts colonial and national recorded history, refusing deliberate racial disinheritance and the layered disavowal of the often ignored but unerasable experiences of people of colour. In this way, living memory shines through the gaps in the murky, and often starkly sanitised official records that populate the archive of South Africa’s past.
Artist Bio
Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, Durban, South Africa) is a painter who considers the legacies of colonialism and migration, and how they haunt and reverberate in the present. She draws from found and family photographs, ephemera and oral history, as well as the material degradation of photographic images over time to consider the ways we construct our identities and the ways we remember.
Pillay’s first institutional show, Idyll, opened at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2023. This followed a residency at Gasworks London at the end of 2022.
Solo shows include Tide and Seed, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. (2022), The Weight of a Nail, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2024) and Sanctum (the light and the shade), Goodman Gallery, New York (2025).
Select group exhibitions include Silence Calling from One Continent to Another, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2021), (Un)Natural : Constructed Environments at the Nasher Museum of Art (2023-2024), Soulscapes at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024) and Standing in the Gap, Goodman Gallery, London (2024).
Pillay was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London, to create a body of work as part of the programme for Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture which opened in September 2025.
Pillay received a degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2015 and was the first prize recipient of the 2022 African Art Galleries Association's Emerging Painting Invitational.
She lives and works in London.
