Invisible Seams

The exhibition “Invisible Seams” stems from Munish Wadhia’s experimental and interdisciplinary relationship with painting. He presents installations where the psychological distance between the foreign and the familiar collapses into a web of connections.

In the work, Munish seeks to renegotiate his experience of his place in the world by examining and freeing himself from Western thought tradition and its assimilating and conforming policies, in order to shape a language that is grounded in the experience of diaspora.

In 2020, Munish Wadhia received the Academy of Fine Arts' exhibition scholarship from the Gerard Bonnier Fund. The scholarship includes an exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts, funds to carry out the exhibition, and an exhibition catalogue.

“Munish Wadhia’s artistic practice can be described as an interweaving and uninterweaving of layers of meaning-making in order, among other things, to stitch identities together. A crocheted cloth from the City Mission is used as a stencil for a mandala, in a painting where a Hindu god has been omitted from the picture, an ambiguous landscape is revealed, which Wadhia’s research shows is likely a European landscape. Through an aesthetic that manipulates the stereotype, especially tied to identity markers, Wadhia reminds us that identity is far from static. It is created in movement and through circular meaning-making together with us; we give it meaning to the same extent that it gives us meaning; we create identity as much as it creates us. Wadhia highlights how essentialism and all the systems that mean that our identities are packaged and sold back to us, give the appearance that identity creates us, a more one-way relationship.

This kind of framing of identity has been of great importance to modernity and its processes of colonialism, where race designates different degrees of humanity, with whiteness placed in the category of the most (or only) human. There are those who believe that art merely reinforces and represents this worldview, through which entire worlds have been obliterated for the emergence of one, but like Sylvia Wynter, Wadhia reminds us that aesthetics is at the center. With enough awareness, we realize that it reveals how the white gaze of modernity lives on within us.”

Text for the exhibition catalogue by Mmabatho Thobejane

(Translation Kajsa Wadhia)