Peffers Fine Art

Hedonic Adaptation: Structures of Survival and Repair

Hedonic Adaptation: Structures of Survival and Repair brings together a focused selection of Edoardo Villa’s steel sculptures from Peffers Fine Art’s holdings with works by contemporary South African artist Tshepo Sizwe Phokojoe.

The exhibition takes its title from the psychological concept of hedonic adaptation: the tendency of individuals and societies to become habituated to changed circumstances, including conditions of discomfort, instability or harm. Within the context of HEAT 2026’s theme, Ctrl + Z, the exhibition asks what happens when structures of damage become normalised, and whether art can interrupt this process through slow looking, material attention and acts of repair.

Rather than treating undoing as a simple reversal, the exhibition considers repair as a complex and ongoing negotiation with inherited forms. Villa’s steel sculptures speak in a language of weight, compression, balance, monumentality and modernist construction. Phokojoe’s work introduces a different material register: one associated with stitching, surface, vulnerability, shelter, memory, re-use, survival and care. Together, the works stage a dialogue between monument and shelter, steel and textile, inherited structure and lived repair.

The exhibition proposes that survival itself has structures. These may be physical, social, psychological, material or historical. Some structures are imposed; others are made in response to pressure. Some offer shelter; others preserve damage. By placing Villa and Phokojoe in dialogue, Hedonic Adaptation asks how art might make visible the forms we have learned to live within, and how acts of attention, repair and re-looking might begin to unsettle them.

Tshepo Sizwe Phokojoe

Tshepo Phokojoe (b. 1995, Soweto) is a self-taught South African multidisciplinary artist whose practice is centred on abstracted explorations of place, belonging and displacement. Working primarily with hessian, alongside other materials, Phokojoe draws on the textile’s layered history in Soweto, where he was raised, particularly from its use by some of the city’s earliest residents, the Sakmen, to its role in the settlement of Masakeng under James “Sofasonke” Mpanza. Hessian, as a medium, also holds personal significance for the artist, as he was first introduced to the manipulation of fabric through his mother.

Phokojoe’s development has been shaped by mentorship and collaborative practice, including the 2017 Peer Mentoring programme at Assemblage Studios under Bronwyn Lace and subsequent work as a studio assistant to Nkhensani Rihlampfu and Nicholas Hlobo. He has gone on to receive multiple awards and participate in numerous residencies, including the 2023 Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize, the Bag Factory’s Young/Unframed residency, RMB Talent Unlocked, and the Rele Arts Foundation’s Young Contemporaries residency in Nigeria, resulting in solo exhibitions including Woven Comforts and TO: IDENTITIES. 

Edoardo Villa (1915-2011)

Edoardo Villa was an Italian-born South African artist who worked primarily in sculpture. His practice centred on the transformation of material through an exacting engagement with form, structure and spatial tension. Working across steel, bronze, wood and stone, Villa developed a sculptural language that moved between abstraction and figuration while pursuing a distinctly African visual identity. Rejecting inherited European conventions, he looked instead to African sculptural traditions as a generative source for a modern language of compression, monumentality and spiritual presence. 

Villa was a founder member of the Amadlozi Group and played an important role at Polly Street, where his teaching, studio practice and exchange with younger artists helped open space for a new generation of sculptors, including Sydney Kumalo and Ezrom Legae, to forge an African-led modernism in South Africa. Villa exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions over the course of his career and is regarded as one of the key figures in South African modernist sculpture. His work is held in major public and private collections, and his legacy continues to shape debates around abstraction, materiality and modernism in the South African context.