Her Gaze, Her Space – Interiority, Visibility and Truth at Rele Gallery

My visit to Her Gaze: A Woman’s Truth at Rele Gallery was not just an encounter with powerful artwork. It was a layered experience of how the female gaze reshapes the role of the viewer, the subject, and the space between them. Focusing on works by Sabrina Coleman-Pinheiro, Kaleab Abate and Chidinma Nnoli, I was reminded of the power of art to communicate the unspoken, and how design, like painting, can be a medium of resistance and reclamation.

This exhibition invites urgent questions: What happens when women define their own visibility? What does truth look like when told from inside the body rather than observed from outside? And what is the role of space, both physical and emotional, in carrying those truths?

Restless Bodies, Shared Pain: The Work of Sabrina Coleman-Pinheiro

Sabrina Coleman-Pinheiro’s Restless Apparitions (2022) and Communal Agony (2022) communicate the weight of inherited trauma and the invisibility of Black womanhood. The figures she paints are both present and fractured, ghost-like insistent. They push against containment, suggesting movement beyond the canvas frame. This is not a tidy narrative of suffering but a representation of what it means to live with emotional and cultural fragmentation.

This aligns with Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) notion of "the afterlife of slavery" a condition that shapes both collective memory and individual interiority long after the historical event. Coleman-Pinheiro’s work speaks to this: the interior is never just personal, it is historical. Her layering and repetition of forms evoke what Tina Campt (2017) describes as "black visual frequency", a rhythm of seeing that goes beyond surface perception.

In the context of my own practice in interior architecture, this reminds me that space too can carry trauma, repetition and silence.

How might a corridor, wall or doorway become a witness to cultural memory?

Interruption and Discomfort: Kaleab Abate’s Visual Provocations

While not a woman, Kaleab Abate’s inclusion in the show brings another layer to the conversation, one that questions the politics of emotional presentation. It’s Not Meant to Be Joyous (2024) and A Bunch of Hypocrites II (2023) resist the notion of art as aesthetically or emotionally comfortable. His subjects are often caught mid-thought, mid-conflict. Their faces are unfinished, confronting the viewer with unresolved emotions.

In recent debates about Black art, students such as Aria Dean (2017) warn of the danger of aestheticising Black pain. Dean questions whether Black suffering is overrepresented at the expense of joy, subtlety or imagination. Abate’s work complicates this by refusing either extreme. His paintings are neither celebratory nor purely mournful, they are honest.

For me, this opens up a debate in spatial design. Should interiors always soothe? Or is there space for discomfort, tension, and resistance? In healthcare and educational environments, for example, we often equate design success with calmness. But as Abate’s work reminds us, not all truths are calm.

Quiet Resistance: Chidinma Nnoli and the Poetics of Stillness

In Have a Little Faith in Me (2024), Chidinma Nnoli invites us into a quiet moment of introspection. The work stands apart for its softness and intimacy. A figure, painted with tenderness and vulnerability, occupies a sparse, almost meditative space. This contrasts sharply with the emotional intensity of other works in the show, but no less powerful.

The piece made me reflect on Sara Ahmed’s (2014) theory of "affective economies", the idea that emotions stick to bodies, objects, and spaces. In Nnoli’s painting, this stickiness is felt in the stillness, in the way colour is used not to dramatise but to hold.

As a designer, this poses an essential challenge: how do we create spaces that support emotional presence without overdesigning? How do we leave room for stillness, for quiet resistance? Nnoli’s work answers this by demonstrating that softness can be radical.

Her Gaze, Not Ours: Who Gets to Look?

One of the most important debates raised by this exhibition is about power and perception. The "gaze" is not neutral, it is always shaped by history, gender, race and position. Her Gaze challenges the dominant, historically masculine and colonial gaze by giving visual authorship back to those who have been observed and interpreted for centuries.

Laura Mulvey (1975) famously wrote about the "male gaze" in cinema, describing how women are often positioned as objects for male pleasure. While her theory was focused on film, it translates to visual art and space. In this exhibition, the artists refuse that position. They do not exist for us. They speak to us, or past us.

In my own research, especially as a Black woman working within architecture, I often consider how users are positioned within space. Are they subjects or objects? Are they meant to participate, or to simply pass through? The power of Her Gaze is that it demands reciprocity.

Conclusion: Design as Witness, Not Neutrality

Her Gaze: A Woman’s Truth was more than a celebration of women’s voices. It was a demand for space that reflects lived complexity, where interiority is not reduced to style but honoured as narrative. From Sabrina Coleman-Pinheiro’s spectral repetition to Kaleab Abate’s visual interruptions and Chidinma Nnoli’s intimate poise, the exhibition insisted on multiplicity.

In my own creative and spatial practice, this experience encouraged me to continue designing for complexity, not consensus. I am reminded that design does not have to neutralise. It can witness, amplify, and challenge, just like these artists have done with paint, texture and vision.

References (Harvard Style)

Ahmed, S. (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Campt, T. (2017) Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press.

Dean, A. (2017) ‘Notes on Blaccelerationism’, e-flux, 87. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/87/169402/notes-on-blaccelerationism/ (Accessed: April 2025).

Hartman, S. (2008) Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hooks, b. (1995) Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press.

Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16(3), pp. 6–18.

Rele Gallery (2024) Her Gaze: A Woman’s Truth. Available at: https://www.rele.co/exhibitions/her-gaze (Accessed: April 2025).