Curated by Sayem Khan
1 August to 7 September 2024
Artists: Ernesto Cabral de Luna, Delali Cofie, Sukaina Kubba, Rajni Perera, Nep Sidhu, and Kendra Yee
It comes to me in waves explores the landscape of memory through material languages of artists whose practices engage in translations of remembrance. Within the exhibition, themes of selfhood, national and diasporic identities, ancestry, and intergenerationality come to the fore, weaving the viewer into a tapestry of intricate and interlinked histories that illuminate the richness and potency of collective and individual memories. The title alludes to the reverberative experience of memories - how they wash over us during particular moments of nostalgia, and leave to come back again. Works in the exhibition speak to the cyclical nature of time and the experience of that cyclicality as embodied in the feeling of nostalgia, receding and crashing back, like waves of a sea to a shore.
In the exhibition, memories open up to subjective and contextualized interpretations, sculpting conventions of history and remembrance as ever-evolving landscapes of experiences, rather than fixed moments in time. The emotional landscape of remembrance becomes more, or at least equally, compelling as any factual analysis or understanding of what has transpired or taken place. A metaphysical resonance of time and space emerges that focuses on the experience of remembering and how that informs our relationship to ourselves and each other. The habitation of memory, or how our memory lives within us, and our relationships with the act of remembrance, is intimately retrieved and translated by the artists in this exhibition. Like the scar of an old wound, or the impression of a body on a bed well slept on, memory sits within and awakens a tender resolution in the act of its own remembrance.
In consideration of objects as retainers of memories and histories, Sukaina Kubba's works in the exhibition explore rugs and carpets as performing in a similar function. Kubba meticulously traces and translates rug designs, drawings, and archives in hand drawn objects made using PLA filaments.* Kubba’s interest in how objects hold memories related to familial histories is prevalent in her fascination with traveling objects, namely textiles and rugs, as carriers of cross-cultural and geographical histories. Parsing through familial and institutional archives of carpets, Kubba extensively researches and emulates rugs from the South West Asia and North Africa region, tracing and retracing their designs in her explorations in order to create an ever increasing distance between the original objects and its drawn likeness. Through this, Kubba seeks to invoke and translate the narratives of travel, trade, and acquisition of rugs, and the domestic encounters and fictional stories they come to represent along the way.
Excerpt from Exhibition Text by Sayem Khan
photos 2, 4, 5, 11, 12 & 14 by Darren Rigo
all other photos by Sukaina Kubba
