REIMAGINING TEXTILE ART

Six contemporary women artists weave memory, tradition, and feminist voices into a powerful exhibition of textile art at AMCA, Mumbai.

 Photo courtesy: AMCA

 n the heart of Colaba, Mumbai, Anupa Mehta Contem porary Art (AMCA) has opened its doors to an exhibi tion that is as much a meditation on memory and ances try as it is a celebration of contemporary craft. Where the River Meets the Sea brings together six women artists who are reshaping the language of textile and fibre art in India: Alamu Kumaresan, Aparajita Jain Mahajan, Dr. Savia Viegas, Hansika Sharma, Lakshmi Madhavan, and Meenakshi Nihalani.

Curated by Anupa Mehta, with a text by Goa-based histori an Lina Vincent, the show places textiles in a broader cultural and feminist context—where the warp and weft of cloth are not merely material but repositories of memory, lineage, and lived experience.

“The river, a symbol of life’s journey, personal growth, memory, transformation, and hybridity, can be read as a metaphor for the creative and artistic impulse flowing through an artist’s work,” Mehta notes. “At the point where it merges with the sea, it becomes part of a larger whole—a more universal truth.”

This duality—the intimate and the expansive—runs through the exhibition. Each artist’s practice is deeply person al, yet together they form a collective narrative that speaks to a larger feminist impulse. The works embrace craft traditions such as embroidery, dyeing, and weaving while breaking away from the hierarchies that long confined textile to the domestic or decorative.

Vincent expands on this legacy: “A glimpse at the textile map of the Indian subcontinent reveals an abundant herit age… woven textiles preserve memory in their warp and weft; they represent culture and social evolution, deeply entwined with the histories of politics, trade, and colonialism. Textile and its decoration are coloured by gendered experience, with forms of needlework, embroidery, knitting, and quilting often relegated to the space of craft and feminine domesticity. To day, those boundaries are being blurred.”

Indeed, the exhibition feels timely. Textile and fibre art are enjoying a global resurgence, increasingly recognised as powerful mediums of resistance, activism, and matrilineal storytelling. For these six artists, thread and dye replace brush and pigment, but the results are no less evocative—often more so, given their tactile intimacy and layered references.

 From works that honour ancestry and tradition to those that challenge gendered narratives, Where the River Meets the Sea is an exploration of materiality as metaphor. The exhibi VOL 7 ISSUE 5 tion invites viewers to not just look, but to feel: the textures of memory, the pull of histories woven into fabric, the strength of women’s voices stitched into every surface.

For collectors and first-time buyers alike, the show offers a rare opportunity to acquire works by artists redefining the pa rameters of textile art in India. More importantly, it positions these practices as part of a continuum—threads connecting past to present, individual stories to universal truths.

At a moment when textile art is stepping firmly into the global spotlight, this exhibition underscores the role of women artists at the forefront of this shift: weaving narratives of resilience, beauty, and transformation, where rivers meet seas and personal histories dissolve into collective conscious ness