In his upcoming solo exhibition in Goa, artist and writer Santanu Borah cuts up the Assamese Gamosa and remakes it in myriad ways.
Reculture, Santanu Borah’s solo exhibition opening at Sadhana Dell’Arte in Goa on 6 November, asks us to look at the Assamese Gamosa closely. In this new body of work, the artist experiments and remagines a crucial artifact of material history and connects it to the universal.
The artistic process
Borah takes traditional handwoven Gamosas and cuts, folds, layers and embeds them into the painting’s surface with polymer paste, acrylic pigments and glue. The fragments work as compositional modules, almost architectural elements. In some paintings, they come together to form a figure. In others, they break apart into abstract formations and textured surfaces. The red motifs, historically associated with fertility, abundance and auspiciousness, turn into geometry, and familiar patterns dissolve into gestures that suggest bodies, landscapes, labour and weather.
“I decided to use it as a unit of composition in my paintings, with a desire to reimagine it,” says Borah.
The exhibition is curated by Nilankur Das, who reads the Gamosa as a democratic textile, one that has moved between the sacred and the everyday for more than seven centuries since it emerged from the weaving traditions of the Brahmaputra valley. In his curatorial note, he describes Borah’s use of the cloth as a kind of non-representational photo album of a culture. Every thread carries traces of daily life: agricultural labour, the rituals of Bihu, gestures of respect, domestic intimacy and the endurance of rural worlds. “In Borah’s hands,” Das writes, “the gamosa is a civilisation folded into cloth.”
The series began far from Goa. “I started making these works, now collectively called Reculture, in Guwahati while living at my brother Dr Prakritish Borah’s house,” Borah recalls. “House No. 71 in Kharguli was where I began to understand more clearly that the Gamosa is the most recognisable unit of Assamese culture. It also made me understand that every culture has its ‘Gamosa’. In that sense, it was a universal idea.”
That idea gives the exhibition its reach. The Gamosa is distinctly Assamese, but the question it raises is not local. What are the ordinary objects that carry a people’s memory, identity and sense of belonging, objects so familiar that no one thinks to look at them?
Borah believes distance helped him see the cloth clearly. “Since I have lived mostly in Pune and Goa, I was able to take a dispassionate as well as a curious look at this garment,” he says. In his artist’s note, he puts it more simply: “Perhaps we need to leave home to discover what home has been telling us all along.”
A tribute to a mother, and to Tezpur
Personal memory runs close to the surface. “It was, in a personal as well as philosophical way, a tribute to my mother,” Borah says, “and eventually to the life that made me, in my small but beautiful Tezpur, where we lived oscillating between joy and sorrow. The Gamosa was always around. But it took me many years to understand it a bit and reimagine it.”
Images from childhood surface in the paintings: his grandmother’s home, a girl working in a distant field, the light of an approaching storm. These recollections go beyond biography, however. The figure that recurs across the series becomes a symbol of sustenance, labour and collective identity.
The title describes Borah’s approach. To “reculture” is to take a living tradition and allow it to evolve through a contemporary artistic language, rather than preserve it untouched. Borah is clear that his project is not one of preservation. “I was more interested in what happens when culture is allowed to change its shape,” he writes.
The result is a hybrid surface where weaving becomes painting, and a humble everyday garment becomes something closer to a map of a people. Taken together, the works explore labour, motherhood, cultural inheritance and the fragile continuity of regional knowledge systems.
Borah also brings some wit to his practice. He continues to paint without the Gamosa, he says, but the underlying impulse stays the same: construction and balance, thought and instinct, “order and the occasional suspicion that order is overrated.”
Reculture by Santanu Borah
Curated by Nilankur Das
6–15 November 2026, 12 noon – 11 pm daily
Opening: Friday, 6 November, 8.30 pm, inaugurated by Rohit Monserrate, Mayor of Panjim, with a musical performance by Gowri Jayakumar followed by an electronic music set by DJ GDawg
Sadhana Dell’Arte, 125, Casa Joao Francisco, after A Lua Restaurant, Merces, Goa 403005 (about 2 km from Panjim Bridge)
Santanu Borah is an artist and writer from Tezpur, Assam, who lives and works in Goa. He is a contributor to Abir Pothi.
Contributor
