Ski(e)n: Re-membering through Performance and Thread: An Exhibition of RCA alumni Abhijna Vemuru Kasa and Insha Manzoor | Curated by Jyoti A Kathpalia

Dhoomimal Gallery presents two exciting artists Abhijna Vemuru Kasa and Insha Manzoor.

These artists, alumni of Royal College of Art (RCA) UK, explore the self and the inscription of time, traditions, space, culture and history. The materiality of their art reflects emotional and psychological encounters of the self, existing on the threshold of time and space – in the immediate past, and as encoded in the cultural memory and the unconscious. The exhibition foregrounds the embodied self, where the embodiment is at once the skin and the skeins, the threads of our lives and memories. Skin is both the layers that we inhabit and also paradoxically the layers that we shed both literally and metaphorically. The skin is the surface on which traumas, transformations and experiences are enacted. Skeins externalise this complex interweaving of memories and nostalgia inviting the viewer into the recreation of the self with the fragile but persistent hope humans retain despite difficult terrains. The word ‘identity’ today bears the weight of overuse shaped by too many theoretical and political appropriations. Hence this exhibition while being wary of the same, turns instead to a more personal exploration of the self – through reconstruction and the remembering. Re-membering is not merely recollection, but the act of ‘membering’ again, in its older etymology of ‘putting back together’ what has been fractured, forgotten or cast aside. It is a deliberate effort to return to a self that is configured outside the dominant, a stitching together that reorients relations between the individual, community and culture. Through these gestures mythic patterns and mythic time re-emerge, offering a glimpse of a temporality that must be recalled and reclaimed if we are to retrieve humanity from violence and oppressive structures. Ski(e)n foregrounds precisely this by bringing skins and skeins into focus as sites where the collective unconscious, tradition, and cultural ethos can be renegotiated through innovative media and ideas. It offers a reclaiming of the self and the world through the feel of memories, dialogue with traditions, and the threads of collective labour, activating an alternate ethics of care and self-expression.

The Skin of Performance: Revisualising the Feminine

Abhijna Vemuru Kasa, through her artworks rich in the sensory perceptions, textures, tactile sensations and intricate body paint aims to externalise those aspects of the feminine that have been forgotten and suppressed within public spaces and politics of the day. Her work weaves an intricate tapestry of memory and experience where decorative art motifs, flora and fauna, local deities and figures demonstrate her affinity to her roots, to miniature art and to the Cheriyal Scroll Painting.

The Skein of Memory and Belonging

Insha Manzoor’s art unravels and reknits the skeins of her own lived milieu and environment through nostalgia and memory, offering a glimpse of a better world. She creates a space where, in her own words, “Everyday objects, hand-crafted/industrial, traditional/modern, popular, all combine materialization of concept or transform everyday elements to challenge the pre-arranged routines of the ordinary and at the same time, it serves in the enunciation of collective identity, especially the regional identity.”

Jyoti A Kathpalia

Curator