Lived-in Skin: Textile as Armour as Memory
Lived-in Skin: Textile as Armour as Memory
May 29, 2026 - Jun 25, 2026
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Lived-in Skin: Textile as Armour as Memory
Charlie Porter translates Louise Bourgeois’s notes in his book ‘What Artists Wear’ where she writes how her garments have always been a source of intolerable suffering. He notes how the American modernist artist instilled her daily clothes with trauma and rage – while keeling over with the prospect of letting them go, every thread heavy with the weight of her grief overflowing into her present, and bearing witness. The rustling of jeans and soft sounds of shirts being folded back recalled a world of queer freedom at the piers in late twentieth-century New York for American painter and photographer David Wojnarowicz.
Clothing accrues weight with usage – textile practices are laden with narratives and symbolism over generations and three South Asian artists working with textile explores this amalgamation of emotional codes in their work. Sri Lankan artist Sabeen Omar’s collaged textiles stand upright under the weight of gesso made from clothes within her family and architectural shapes encountered in familiar spaces within unfamiliar cities. Baroda-based Meenakshi Nihalani encloses this tension within pickle jars appliqued over soft cotton, signifying recipes her grandmother carried with them as knowledge even as they crossed borders during Partition – and the remaining silence of her community around the tumultuous event, unwilling to relive a past even through memory.
For Delhi-based artist-weaver Anshu Singh, a past life of garments is conjured as she works with industrial textile remnants in her locality foregrounding the labour in textile creation and the inherited designs in garment units which get passed down generations. It’s a certain kind of fissure that all artists capture beneath smooth surfaces making garments volatile pieces unearthing erasure and strife.
Bio: Upasana Das is an arts and culture writer. She has previously written for ArtReview, Wallpaper, The Guardian, British Journal of Photography, BOMB, Elephant Art, The New York Times, Dazed, Vogue India, DAG, Serendipity Arts Foundation, Experimenter Gallery among others.
CURATORIAL NOTE
Lived-in Skin: Textile as Armour as Memory
Presented by LATITUDE 28
Charlie Porter translates Louise Bourgeois’s notes in his book ‘What Artists Wear’ where she writes how her garments have always been a source of intolerable suffering. He notes how the American modernist artist instilled her daily clothes with trauma and rage – while keeling over with the prospect of letting them go, every thread heavy with the weight of her grief overflowing into her present, and bearing witness. The rustling of jeans and soft sounds of shirts being folded back recalled a world of queer freedom at the piers in late twentieth-century New York for American painter and photographer David Wojnarowicz.
Clothing accrues weight with usage – textile practices are laden with narratives and symbolism over generations and three South Asian artists working with textile explores this amalgamation of emotional codes in their work. Sri Lankan artist Sabeen Omar’s collaged textiles stand upright under the weight of gesso made from clothes within her family and architectural shapes encountered in familiar spaces within unfamiliar cities. Baroda-based Meenakshi Nihalani encloses this tension within pickle jars appliqued over soft cotton, signifying recipes her grandmother carried with them as knowledge even as they crossed borders during Partition – and the remaining silence of her community around the tumultuous event, unwilling to relive a past even through memory.
For Delhi-based artist-weaver Anshu Singh, a past life of garments is conjured as she works with industrial textile remnants in her locality foregrounding the labour in textile creation and the inherited designs in garment units which get passed down generations. It’s a certain kind of fissure that all artists capture beneath smooth surfaces making garments volatile pieces unearthing erasure and strife.
Bio: Upasana Das is an arts and culture writer. She has previously written for ArtReview, Wallpaper, The Guardian, British Journal of Photography, BOMB, Elephant Art, The New York Times, Dazed, Vogue India, DAG, Serendipity Arts Foundation, Experimenter Gallery among others.
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