In Person: The Nights Will Follow the Days
The Nights Will Follow the Days, curated by Shalmali Shetty, proposes the spectral as a manifestation of memory. Exploring loss and belonging as they cut across place, time and identities, the exhibition is an iteration of the inaugural curatorial fellowship by the Art South Asia Project and Serendipity Arts Foundation. Shetty brings together works by five South Asian and diasporic artists to reflect on ideas of identity and belonging beyond temporal planes. The narrative of the show is premised on the story of a woman who keeps reappearing in her home after her passing as a spectral presence. Her haunting ceases after one last appearance in the house before it was demolished.
Amba Sayal-Bennett and Sumakshi Singh explore the physicality of homes as lived structures that inhabit history and memory through their careful sculptural reconstructions of homes from their own histories. Shiraz Bayjoo, Alia Syed and Munem Wasif explore the riverine and oceanic as sites of displacement, migration and political histories. In this edited walkthrough, Shetty elaborates on the process of research for the exhibition, the individual works that she curated as well as the way each of them reflects on the intertwining of multiple histories, individual memories and cultural imaginaries around statehood, diasporic identity and histories of colonisation and partitions.
Shalmali Shetty is a curator, writer and artist working between India and the UK. She completed her BVA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda, an MA in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and an MLitt in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) from the Glasgow School of Art, supported by the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship. Her research interests include themes of archives, memories, hauntology, oral histories and speculative ideas around prophecies, oracles and imagined futures, extending this focus through the familiar framework of India, and the Global South’s neo-colonial relationship to the West.
(Featured image: Installation view of Amba Sayal-Bennett's work as part of the exhibition The Nights Will Follow the Days by Shalmali Shetty).
Recorded on 17 December 2023.
The Nights Will Follow The Days is being exhibited at the Excise Building as a part of the 8th Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim, Goa, until 23 December 2023.
To learn more about ASAP | art’s coverage of this year’s Serendipity Arts Festival, watch the previous episode of In Person, where members from The Packet and participating artists conduct a walkthrough of their exhibition HOLY FLUX! Also revisit Arundhati Chauhan’s conversation with Veeranganakumari Solanki on her exhibition Synaesthetic Notations, as well as Annalisa Mansukhani’s conversation with Vidya Shivadas on her show Turning: On Field and Work and with Ravi Agarwal on his shows Time as a Mother and Blue Carbon, co-curated with Damian Christinger and Jahnavi Phalkey respectively.
