Hedonic Adaptation: Structures of Survival and Repair brings Edoardo Villa's steel sculptures from the 1990s into dialogue with works by contemporary South African artist Tshepo Sizwe Phokojoe. The sculptures are drawn from the holdings of Friedland Art, the last gallery to represent Villa in his lifetime.

Taking its title from the psychological concept of hedonic adaptation, the exhibition explores how individuals and societies become habituated to discomfort, instability and harm. Within HEAT 2026's theme, Ctrl + Z, it asks whether art can interrupt this normalisation through slow looking, material attention and acts of repair.

Villa's sculptures speak through weight, balance, compression and modernist construction, while Phokojoe's work introduces stitching, vulnerability, memory, re-use, identity and placeless-ness. Together, they stage a dialogue between monument and shelter, steel and textile, inherited structure and lived repair.

The exhibition considers survival as something structured - physically, socially, psychologically and historically. It asks how art can reveal the forms we have learned to live within, and how attention, repair and re-looking might begin to unsettle them.