‘Remember Me Until the Winter’: Lives of urban material
The art show explores how cities, bodies and objects impact memory
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Resisting the logic of an ordinary exhibition is ‘Remember Me Until the Winter’. Curated by Gourmoni Das in association with the Dot Line Space Art Foundation, it is not arranged as a sequence of works but a terrain of traces, sounds and surfaces. The building itself shapes the experience; its broken columns and uneven walls intervene in the viewing at Nine Fish Art Gallery in Mumbai’s Great Eastern Mills. “The venue is a collaborator and a sentient interlocutor,” Das says. “Its rusted beams, cracked plaster, and echoing corridors dictated the rhythm of placement.”
The show brings together over 20 artists whose works approach memory in many registers: emotional, material, political. “It’s a polyphony of sensibilities orbiting around the idea of memory as unstable matter,” Das explains.
Viji Venkatesh, for instance, “explores the corporeal residue of remembrance, where the body becomes an instrument of emotional inscription”. Bela Mardia “translates her memories into clay, creating rooms that preserve fragments of her past; her ceramics resonate with the idea of time layered into architecture and material”.
Filmmaker Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, a curatorial adviser at the Foundation, extends that conversation into the cinematic realm; she will be in dialogue with filmmaker Sai Paranjpye later in November, exploring what Das calls “the poetics of narrative memory”. Swapnil Godase’s ‘The Mill Gate’ turns an iron structure into a record of Mumbai’s mill workers: their labour, disappearance, and the still-unsettled demand for justice.
Punarvasu Joshi’s ‘Unseen/Unsaid — They Fell Through the Noise’ constructs a stripped domestic interior where everyday objects register the gravity of silence and the slow erosion of connection. Manjit Gogoi’s ‘Remember Me Until the Winter’ examines the lives of urban materials — discarded, repurposed, renewed — to question how matter endures, disappears, and returns in the city’s cycle of change.
Sandeep Manchekar’s ‘Reminiscence of the Art Foundation in the Mills’ uses a ceramic-textile curtain to reflect on what remains when industrial sites turn into cultural spaces, linking material memory with the act of rebuilding. Sunil Mahadik’s ‘Ya Ghat Bheetar… — Kabir’ interprets the poet’s verse as a meditation on the human body as both vessel and cosmos, a site where the divine and the self are inseparable. Milind Bhurke’s ‘Iron and Echoes: A Legacy in Colour’ captures Mumbai’s mill era through the patina of its machines and the fading away of the worker’s voice from history.
Hansodnya Sahdev Tambe’s ‘Quantum Square’ builds a modular wall of interlocking cuboids, an engineered structure that can be dismantled and reassembled. ‘Echoes of Space’ by Sonal Sancheti, an adviser at the Dot Line Space Art Foundation, turns a mill corridor into a sensory archive, using clay, paper, and sound to trace how place, touch and memory remake one another. The title, says Das, gestures toward a threshold, an interregnum between presence and absence.
Das wanted the exhibition to exist within that temperature of in-between time: “not a plea to remember, but a meditation on the impossibility of doing so”. For him, time here is neither nostalgia nor futurity, but “a viscous and cyclical condition”.
That instability extends to the city. “Mumbai operates here as an unseen protagonist,” Das says. “Its chronic condition of reinvention became both structure and metaphor.” The mill, once an emblem of industry, stands as an unfinished sentence in the city’s constant rewriting of itself. “Walking through the show is akin to moving through Mumbai, a drift across layers of absence, reclamation, persistence. The exhibition (on view till November 17) asks what it means to remember in a place that keeps changing its skin.”
— Quadri writes on art and culture
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