For Art Dubai 2025, our booth presents a curation of artworks that reckon with the fragility (and volatility) of memory itself; banal objects become containers of oneiric and political realities, as one rediscovers their intrinsic, imminent, and deeply felt narratives. Soft textiles morph into temporal and geopolitical landscapes in Risham Syed’s Text and Contexts: The Olive Tree Series. Syed transforms vintage Chinese jacquard silk panels - which she inherited from her late mother - into woven layers imbued with the weight of history. Out here, unexpected juxtapositions hold your gaze: gentle florals and ancestral sari borders lie embedded inside fierce, conflicted political cartographies.
In contrast, Huma Mulji’s works substantiate not a presence, but an erasure: the absence of what may or may not be said (and remembered). An email correspondence between the artist and a friend - sharing the joys and challenges of working collaboratively - is saved, crossed out, and embroidered on fabric. One witnesses a deliberate erasure, alluding not only to political censorship, but also an illegibility woven into the act of recollection itself. Intricately stitched patterns emerge from hastily scribbled words that cannot be read. Mulji refers to Adania Shibli’s novel, Minor Detail and Diana di Prima’s revolutionary poems, drawing our focus into ongoing political conflicts.
In a similar vein, Khandakar Ohida infuses our political imaginary with hues of magical realism: as a trained miniature painter, When Tomorrow Unfolds conjures a fluid, dream-like space. Ohida analyses the ascendancy of parochial politics in India, which renders marginalised Muslim communities precarious. She does not document such institutionalised violence - rather, her paintings forge possibilities of resistance and radical solidarity. Whereas Ohida rediscovers corporeality of historical memory, Pallavi Paul explores its manifested materials: objects, motifs, and ornaments. Noor, her series of silk screen prints on sandpaper, is dedicated to the simultaneous persistence and fading of memories. These objects and motifs - drawn from photographs of Paul’s ongoing research - are derived from chadars, shawl-like fabrics gently placed by devotees on sacred shrines and by loved ones on the graves of their family. At once, they appear to fade and emerge; a contrasting movement that echoes our collective repositories of affection, hope, and tenderness.
For Mahesh Baliga, the elusive contours of memory may be grasped through an act of material translation - in his new Wood on paint series, a painter wonders if concrete wood could capture the fluidity of paint. With this rigorous experiment, Baliga composes a striking series of painterly wood inlay works, inspired by his earlier paintings on canvas. As the artist notes, “each piece evolved in unexpected ways as the grains and textures of wood revealed themselves during sanding… while wood cannot fully replicate the freedom of paint, its depth and warmth brought me layers of what happens when translations take place between different mediums and materials.” In a parallel experiment, Shreyas Karle questions the very paradigms that determine the materiality of an ‘object’ and its semantic possibilities. Karle’s absurd - yet uncannily familiar - wooden sculpture resists conventional definitions: a wooden object with four functional wheels cannot move forward for each wheel is aligned in a different direction by design. As such, Karle’s paradoxical object can only move in circles around itself.
- Sonali Bhagchandani
