Courtesy of the artist.
The exhibition ritual intimacies signals a world of diasporic relations, threading together visual histories and decolonial desires. Through textile works, paintings, and printed matter, Toronto-based artist Meera Sethi brings to the Prairies visions of historical iconographies and future mutualities, moving through the present to produce radical possibilities.
Meera Sethi is a contemporary Canadian visual artist with an interdisciplinary, intuitive, and research-based practice that moves between painting, drawing, fibre, photography, illustration, performance, and social practice. Through her work, she delves deep into the ways we understand and appreciate cloth, clothing, and the worn body, including its histories, its resonances, and its possibilities.
Noor Bhangu is a curator and scholar, whose practice is rooted in relational curatorial aesthetics and practices. Through curatorial intervention, she hopes to involve politics of history, memory and materiality to problematize dominant histories of representation. She completed her BA in the History of Art and her MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg. In 2018, she began her PhD in Communication and Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University in Tkaronto, Toronto.
She is a co-curator for Window Winnipeg (CA), a 24-hour art space for site-responsive presentations of contemporary art, with Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Jennifer Smith. Her independent curatorial projects have shown in Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, and Norway.
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Meera Sethi
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Meera Sethi: ritual intimacies
Guest curated by Noor Bhangu
The solo exhibition of Meera Sethi’s work at Dunlop Art Gallery opens in relation to the group exhibition, the excess is ritual, at Dunlop Art Gallery, Central Library, and brings together key works from the artist’s ongoing interest in issues of diaspora, identity, and fashion. Tracing roots, routes, and responsibilities, Sethi marks the space of the gallery as a potential site for diasporic evocation and relational possibilities. On display are works from four series, including Foreign Returned, Outerwhere, Unskilled, and Yoga: A Sartorial Guide.
Meera Sethi’s present legacy in contemporary art has formed almost exclusively from her colour-filled fashioning of diaspora. Her illustrations of diasporic subjects, ranging from urban queers to aging aunties, grace the covers of scholarly texts, such as Fashioning Diaspora (2016) by Vanita Reddy and Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, and Transnationality (2015) by Purnima Mankekar; her work is also in both private and public collections. ritual intimacies features two paintings from Foreign Returned, portraits of Sudha Subramanium (Sue) and K. Swaminathan (Sam). Incorporating the flat visuality and garmenting of Mughal miniatures from the 16th to 19th century, the two portraits seamlessly intersect the colourful iconographies of Sethi’s Indian roots with tokens taken from the contemporary cultural archive, such as iPods, metallic dabbas, and passports.
Sethi’s large-scale paintings have invited and sustained critical engagement into the relationships between diaspora and fashion, and while Foreign Returned embodies a bold fashioning of bodies moving across time and space, Outerwhere is a quiet return to the heart of diaspora. Stitched from a collection of winter coats, Outerwhere fabulates the personal, political, and environmental changes experienced by the immigrant subject, when the cold winds of new inhabitations strike and make our bodies other. Protected by the rough exteriors, the inner world of Outerwhere holds intimate excavations of visions lost and recovered. The Funkasia stitches together garlands of Canadian notes with plastic flowers, colourful gotas and images of loving cherubs, crowned by a beautifully ornamented ceremonial sehra. Looking into the collection of such ritual objects, we are left to wonder about the fluidity of tradition in the face of queer diasporic desire.
In comparison to Foreign Returned and Outerwhere, we are presented a more critical self-reflexivity in the arrangement of mixed-media drawings from Unskilled, completed during the pandemic in response to media coverage of labour protests in South Asia. Through these works, Sethi punctures a sizable hole in the utopic fictions of diaspora and its optimistic reliance on fashion. Consuming media articles, which in turn informed the titling of the works, the artist collected images of garment workers and zoomed in on the patterns of their quotidian dress, ranging from geometric minimalism to floral maximalism. Forming a thread of care between herself and the exploited bodies of garment production, these disembodied portraits of protesting workers nonetheless gesture to our shared responsibility to class consciousness, which so often evades our reckoning with diaspora.
In curating the excess is ritual and ritual intimacies, I have come to better understand ritual as a language of the margins. Living amidst the excess of loss, silences, and returns, we the queers and the marginal yearn for rituals and intimacies that can shield us from the wreckage of history and diaspora. Meera Sethi’s ritual intimacies is such a vision, a cacophony of roots, routes, and the responsibilities we must hold.
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Photos by Don Hall
