Skin as canvas, thread as memory

Exploring the self and the inscription of traditions, space, culture and history is ‘Ski(e)n: Re-membering through Performance and Thread’, an exhibition at Dhoomimal Gallery in Delhi. It showcases the works of Abhijna Vemuru Kasa and Insha Manzoor, both alumni of the Royal College of Art in London. Curated by Jyoti A Kathpalia, the exhibition will open with a preview on December 5.

Kasa, who alternates between Hyderabad and San Francisco, takes on the restrictive norms and traditions that essentialise women. She simultaneously draws on local myths and stories, revitalising and reinterpreting them to articulate a vision of the feminine that is more authentic to women’s lived experience. Her practice also addresses the post-partum experience, insisting on a feminine subjectivity that is more authentic and real.

Manzoor, who hails from Kashmir, highlights how craft traditions such as weaving, embroidery — hearkening back to intergenerational memory, knowledge and care — can become anchors of the self in an unstable world of oppression and geopolitics. Art practices of the two, though very different in their media and style, also complement each other as both artists interrogate the very networks and practices that enforce subordination and restrictive roles, reworking them through the metaphors of body and motifs of thread.

The materiality of their art reflects emotional and psychological encounters of the self, existing on the threshold of time and space, where both the immediate and distant past are encoded in cultural memory and the unconscious.

The exhibition also explores new media used by these artists as an integral part of their visual practice. The skin as body-surface, skein as cultural carrier of memory, are rendered in photographs, on screen and through installations. Performance, its digital documentation and immersive experiences become creative sites where art reconfigures traditional craft vocabularies into new media languages suited to the multilayered, digital world around us. A significant aspect of the exhibition is how performance, the practice of painting on the skin, and immersive installations with weaving and skeins, transform surfaces into conduits of memory and alternate imaginaries.

Kathpalia notes, “This exhibition has a lot to do with the negotiation of the self and the gender-inscribed body, and of the self as a site of reconnaissance into the cultural motifs and craft, in order to recover connections between the individual and her fraught environment. Abhijna Vemuru Kasa and Insha Manzoor, while working in different media and visual languages, converge in their search for ways of re-inscribing the self in the world by attempting to visualise parity through skin and skein.”

Uday Jain, director of Dhoomimal Gallery, adds, “The two artists have a distinct international outlook while being very much rooted in their cultures and spaces. This aspect lends a rare uniqueness and individuality to their art.”

The exhibition, on view from December 6 to January 10, features a diverse range of media, including oils, acrylics, mixed media, wool, thread, fabric, installation art, performance art and performance documented through photography, among others. Visitors can also look forward to an art talk and immersive curatorial walks.