invisble seams / osynliga sömmar

Konstakadmeien 15-October - 19 November 2022

Munish Wadhia’s practice can be described as being about layering and delayering to, amongst other things, pull apart identity at the seems. A doily found at a local Stadsmis- sionen may be used a stencil to reveal a mandala; a Hindu god removed from a painting reveals a now ambiguous landscape that we learn, through Wadhia’s research, is likely a European landscape. Through the aesthetic and the manipulating of the stereotypical, especially as tied to markers of identity, Wadhia shows that identity is far from static.

It is dynamic, shaped by movement and in circular meaning-making with us; we give it meaning in as much as it gives us meaning; we make it in as much as it makes us.

Wadhia reminds us that essentialism and any system that means to package and sell our identities back to us or others, would have us think that it makes us and gives us meaning; a more unidirectional relationship.

This kind of framing of identity is and has been quite valuable to modernity and its processes of colonialism through which race denotes degrees of humanity, with white- ness occupying the category of most (or only) human. Some may deduct that aesthetics merely reify and represent this worldview, through which entire worlds have been ended for the emergence of one, but echoing Sylvia Wynter, Wadhia reminds us that aesthestics are at the centre. With enough awareness, one realises that they reveal to us how the gazes of whiteness and modernity reside in us.

Mmabatho Thobejane