DS Galerie is pleased to present “Krazé pilé ziska féklèr”, Brandon Gercara’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, opening on Saturday, October 17, 2026. An artist, researcher, and queer and decolonial activist, Brandon Gercara works across performance, photography, video, painting, and installation to explore colonial legacies, queer narratives, and processes of creolization. Following their first institutional solo exhibition at La Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art, “Krazé pilé ziska féklèr” is the second major presentation in an exceptional autumn for the artist, culminating in November with DS Galerie’s presentation of Conversations in the Emergence sector of Paris Photo.

Dance to survive.
Dance to pass it on.
Dance until the light returns.

With “Krazé pilé ziska féklèr”, Brandon Gercara takes maloya as the starting point for an exploration of spirituality, memory, and creation as inseparable forces. More than a cultural inheritance, this practice, which emerged among enslaved communities on Réunion Island, is approached as a living force: one capable of traversing centuries, connecting the living to their ancestors, and giving rise to new imaginaries.

In Réunion Creole, krazé pilé ziska féklèr could be translated as “dance until dawn.” The expression echoes Kraz in maloya, which refers to dancing maloya with such intensity that the feet pound the ground. Even in chains, bodies find ways to move. Dance becomes a space of creolization, a passage into the immaterial, a path towards the ancestors and, through ritual, a means of escaping the pain of the material world.

Long suppressed by colonial authorities, maloya was practiced at night. The word féklèr, referring to daybreak, thus carries a double promise: the return of light, but also the possibility of transformation. Through a new body of work, Brandon Gercara approaches maloya not as a cultural heritage to be preserved, but as a force to be activated. The works brought together in the exhibition extend this transformative potential, bringing Creole spiritualities, queer narratives, colonial legacies, and contemporary fictions into dialogue. Ritual becomes a space in which memories are both transmitted and reinvented, where the past is never fixed but continually set in motion. “Krazé pilé ziska féklèr” can thus be read as “Destroy systems of domination until the light returns,” or, simply, as “Dance until freedom.”