LATITUDE 28 is hosting a new group exhibition featuring artists Sabeen Omar, Meenakshi Nihalani, and Anshu Singh. Their work explores how textiles hold memories, labour, and emotional stories passed down through generations.
Lived-in Skin: Textile as Armour as Memory looks at cloth as more than just a material. The artists show how fabric is shaped by touch, use, and survival. Using weaving, stitching, layering, and found fabrics, they explore ideas of migration, inheritance, displacement, and care.
The exhibition is inspired by writer Upasana Das, who sees clothing as a place where memory and identity stay alive. It also references artists such as Louise Bourgeois and David Wojnarowicz, showing textiles as both witnesses and archives.
Sri Lankan artist Sabeen Omar uses discarded and family fabrics to make layered textile pieces that blend painting, architecture, and memory. Her art looks at how familiar spaces connect with new cities, turning fabric scraps into emotional records.
Meenakshi Nihalani focuses on weaving and appliqué, often using pickle jars as symbols of inherited knowledge. Her work reflects on recipes and memories that travelled across borders during Partition, and also explores silence and memories passed down through generations.
Delhi-based artist and weaver Anshu Singh uses leftover textiles from garment and weaving factories. By repairing and repeating patterns, her work highlights the labour involved in textile production and the endurance stories found in fabric.
In an accompanying essay, Upasana Das writes, “Clothing accrues weight with usage – textile practices are laden with narratives and symbolism over generations and three South Asian artists working with textile explore this amalgamation of emotional codes in their work.”
The exhibition presents cloth as a material rich in emotional and political meaning. It holds signs of loss, labour, migration, and remembrance in its fibres and folds.
Feature image: Meenakshi Nihalani’s artwork (credit: Gallery)
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