Walking Root Route

Monali Meher’s Walking Root Route brings together performance, photography, drawing, glass, textile, installation and neon to consider how bodies, places and materials carry one another across time. The title establishes the exhibition’s central proposition: walking as action and passage, root as attachment and origin, and route as movement, migration and chosen path. In Meher’s practice, these terms are not opposites. They continually alter one another.

The exhibition is structured less by medium than by acts of transformation. Gold leaf, turmeric, glass, jute, thread, soil, brick, pigment, cloth, gauze, recycled fabric, copper, leaves and light enter the works as charged substances. They are handled, stained, wrapped, heated, suspended, stitched, scattered or carried.
Matter is not passive here. It retains the pressure of touch, labour, ritual, memory and change.

Across the exhibition, ground appears in several registers. The body becomes ground through walking, wrapping, fasting, breathing, lying down and carrying. The earth becomes ground through soil, root, sand, leaf, brick, turmeric, glass and pigment. Language becomes ground through neon, vernacular words and titles such as Ghadamodi, Where Is The Soul?, Makan Dukan, Sea Sail Sell and In The Shard, The Landscape Remembers Itself. These works suggest that landscape is not only something seen from a distance; it may also be held in fragments, vessels, fibres, words and gestures.

The red thread is one of Meher’s most persistent lines. It binds, marks, repairs, protects and continues. From the wrapped knife in Breathing to Bound/Unbound, from stitched public surfaces to jute, cloth and landscape, thread becomes both material and thought. It carries the tension between attachment and movement without resolving it.

Walking Root Route places Meher within histories of feminist performance, material practice, ecological thinking and South Asian public culture, while insisting on the particularity of her language. The street, the body, the shrine, the household, the landscape and the archive do not remain separate. They meet through acts of making. In Meher’s hands, matter remembers; the root moves; the route binds; and the landscape continues to recognise itself in altered form.