The Vast Landsacpe of Memory: Recent works by Shloka Dhar
Art, often weaves, ties, binds and winds the maker through fabrics of time, situating subjectivities in the context of daily life, and culture—holding space for what was and what is to come. Shloka Dhar’s work looks at memory as a landscape: her work becomes dimensional planes in which we view, access and exist with spatial relationships to memories. Her work uses intergenerational memory to compose what is part of the future infinities of memory. Dhar uses her background in molecular biology to explore her Kashmiri cultural heritage and feeling of being physically displaced from Kashmir. Through her series of works Dhar sees the narrative of memory as transitional, mailable and able to undergo transformations.
In her work Dhar conceptualizes genetic memory as a physical material. Trans generational epigenetics, or memories that are present without sensory experiences exist in Dhar’s work just as other memories, like patterns, sewing techniques and “craft memory” followed her through her mother’s journey as she fled Kashmir without physical Indian garments. Dhar distorts the function of these materials, clothing and patterns act as neuron, “establishing a connection with (her) ancestors through any way possible” and establish “community generated information”. Dhar uses materials skillfully with a freedom that allows her to rethink what the materials can do and what they are for. Lengths of steel become colorful mountain landscapes that are dense and light at the same time. Her hands and studio practice embody the cutting edge of craft (or quite possibly “post-craft”) and craftspersonship as it continues to exist in the present and future. Her work uses craft as a framework, thing through ideas physically and in response to culture, memory and subjectivity. Her work exemplifies craft as a way for preserving traditions, allowing them to shift in order to exist in the future.
This body of work poses an answer to the profound and heart wrenching question Dhar asks, “How can I be a Kashmiri when there is no more Kashmir?” The artist’s colorful works are often physically large spreading, like neurons across the space of the room traveling and expanding. Dhar explains that her work Mõaj asserts itself in space. “The piece deserves to take up space and occupy the entire room. Kashmiri Pandidts deserve to take up space. Women deserve to take up space. I deserve to take up space.” Dhar’s work is on the cutting edge of what a craft or post craft practice can look like, and most importantly what it can do. Craft, as a framework for thinking through ideas physically in response to culture, memory, subjectivity and community is a way of preserving making traditions by letting them undergo necessary shifts for them to exist in the future.
Curitorial Statement by A Grix
VIRGA
Virga is a collaborative curatorial project that explores methods of deviation and desire. Possibility manifests in the sky, as a Virga cloud with streaks of precipitation seen, but not felt on the ground. These clouds occur when falling rain passes over a warm or dry patch of air and the liquid evaporates before it reaches the ground. The rain is forced to divert paths and change into new forms. What starts out as a single path becomes many paths, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow and towards futurity and new ways of being.
Curatorial Project by A Grix and Brook Vann
Artists:
Martha Russo
Deya Guy-Vasson
larí garcia
Noa Fodre
Judith Leinen
Photographs by Raymundo Muñoz
Union Hall
Full Curitoral Text