This upcoming Delhi exhibit weaves past and present through thread and cultural memory

Dhoomimal Gallery in New Delhi is set to present Ski(e)n: Re-membering through Performance and Thread, a compelling two-person exhibition featuring the work of Royal College of Art alumni Abhijna Vemuru Kasa and Insha Manzoor. Running from December 6, 2025, to January 10, the show delves into the profound ways that history, culture, and personal memory are inscribed onto the body and carried through traditional craft. Curated by Jyoti A Kathpalia, the collection explores the psychological and emotional encounters of the self, positioning the artists on a threshold where the past and the present converge within cultural memory.

Here's what to expect from the exhibition

The practices of Kasa and Manzoor, though distinct in their media and style, share a core investigative impulse. Hyderabad and San Francisco-based Abhijna Vemuru Kasa engages directly with restrictive norms and traditions that often essentialise women. She tackles these issues by simultaneously drawing upon local myths and stories, reinterpreting them to articulate a vision of the feminine that is authentic to women’s lived experience, including the often-unaddressed post-partum experience. Meanwhile, Insha Manzoor, hailing from Kashmir, anchors her work in craft traditions. She highlights how practices like weaving and embroidery become crucial carriers of intergenerational memory, knowledge, and care, offering stability to the self within an unstable world of geopolitical tension and oppression.

The exhibition integrates new media as a central element of its visual practice. The self is rendered across various surfaces, translating the 'skin' (as body-surface) and 'skein' (as cultural carrier) into photographs, screen documentation, and immersive installations. Performance, and its digital record, becomes a creative site where traditional craft vocabularies are reconfigured into new media languages suited to the multilayered, digital world.

Curator Jyoti noted that the show is fundamentally about the "negotiation of the self and the gender-inscribed body," where the artists converge in their search for visual parity through the metaphors of skin and thread.