In their latest track exhibition, 'Where the River Meets the Sea', Anupa Mehta Contemporary Art stages a meditation on textile as a medium of feminist memory, material politics, and poetic transformation. The group exhibition draws its resonance from the point where the artist’s creative impulse (the river) becomes part of a broader, universal dialogue (the sea). Beneath the curatorial embrace lie six richly diverse practices, each threading ancestral lineage into contemporary feminist reflection.
Alamu Kumaresan crafts embroidered portraits and abstraction using a variety of stitches and materials like beads, yarn, punch needle, tie-dye. Her textile 'paintings' celebrate women who inspire her — friends, mentors, and a self-portrait buoyant in water, transforming ordinary lives into affirmation of feminine strength. Aparajita Jain Mahajan engages in a delicate process of mark-making on handmade paper, where layered collages become a tactile topography of time, loss, and continuity, with her mother’s textiles reassembled into fragments of legacy and new narrative landscapes.
Dr. Savia Viegas resurrects the rich oral history of her Goan village, with embroidey on discarded denim. Quilts become storyboards of warnings, tenderness, and collective memory. She resists the relegation of embroidery to 'women’s work', and instead forges a deeply personal archive of resistance and belonging. Hansika Sharma uses indigo as both emotional and political vocabulary. Her embroidered tapestries and abstracts channel personal melancholy, inner strength, and historical memory, stitching patterns that echo neural networks or root systems, offering introspection as a form of political transformation.
Lakshmi Madhavan collaborates with the kasavu weavers of Balaramapuram to reimagine ancestral cloth as an archive. Her gold-and-white weaves map the body, caste, loss, and heritage. By weaving the Malayalam alphabet and experimenting with black and red on kasavu, she reframes cloth as site of gendered history and social hierarchy. Meenakshi Nihalani merges sculpture, block-print, embroidery and installation to interrogate the absurdities of colonial legacies, agrarian distress, and social trauma. Her textile-based forms become surreal metaphors, stitching political critique into the fabric of our collective consciousness.
Together, in the practice of these six women, textile stops being a material and becomes a method. Across the room you see the same operations — cutting, joining, mending, over-stitching, repurposing, used not for aesthetic purposes but for thinking. Portraits slide toward diagrams; quilts read like minutes of a place; collages behave as ledgers; sculptural textiles stage the afterlife of policy and propaganda. The hand is legible everywhere, turning duration and care into visible data. Salvaged or domestic cloth shifts value away from novelty toward use, while the scale toggles from body-close to wall-wide, moving the viewer between intimacy and public address. 'Where the River Meets the Sea', is an argument that techniques that were historically assigned to care work are also tools for reconciling with the past and the present, building knowledge and naming power.
The exhibition is on view at the Anupa Mehta Contemporary Art gallery in Mumbai till September 11. Follow them here.
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