Lemkus Gallery | GIRLS TOO: TOO MUCH, NEVER ENOUGH

Last year, Keely Shinners, along with her long-time friend and collaborator Dominique Cheminais, curated GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, a pop-up exhibition exploring feminity and its discontents. Building on this foundation, Keely embarked on a curatorial residency at Lemkus Gallery, where she worked towards a sequal to GIRLS/ This residency provided an opportunity to reflect more deeply on a central question: What makes us girls? Who is “us”? What does it mean to be “girls”?

In line with Jacqueline Rose's perspective that  "anatomy is a sham," Keely's interpretation of “girls” goes beyond biology. She is wary of rigid categories like gender and sexuality, which are, in her view, too fluid to  be contained by a term like “girls.” For Keely, girls are a mystery—an enigma, a vanishing point, a sense. It is a sense of both excess and depletion; a paradox of being "too much" and yet never "enough." The artists featured in this exhibition approach their work from different perspectives, but all share a connection to this paradox: TOO MUCH, NEVER ENOUGH.

The exhibition is divided into seven distinct parts, each representing an occasion—a moment when the sense of girls becomes tangible. These occassions are: THE WOMB, THE MODEL, THE MIRROR, THE TOUCH, THE MONSTER, THE GODDESS, and finally, THE GIRLS.

The exhibition is divided roughly into seven parts. I like to think of each part as an occasion. An occasion at which a sense of girls becomes palpable. The occasions are as follows: THE WOMB, THE MODEL, THE MIRROR, THE TOUCH, THE MONSTER, THE GODDESS, and finally THE GIRLS.

This exhibition will run from  3 March to 3 April 2025. Keely Shinner was assisted in curating this exhibition by Mihlali Jiya