THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS
Alka Dass
24 September – 15 December
Lemkus Gallery is pleased to present The Inheritance of Loss, a new body of work by Alka Dass. The exhibition marks Dass’s first solo presentation with the gallery, an ambitious, trans-disciplinary project centred on the quiet labour of remembering. The title, borrowed from Kiran Desai’s 2006 novel of the same name, captures Dass’s engagement with loss as a form of historical rupture. Responding to the various forms of epistemic injustice faced by Indian South African subjects, the exhibition frames cultural memory as a form of inheritance that requires active engagement to endure. The resulting anamnestic process (aiding or stimulating memory) is apparent through the treatment of photographic archives and found objects. Family photographs, domestic textiles and everyday objects become vessels for histories that have survived not because they remained intact, but because they have been tended to across generations.
Dass approaches memory as an inherently unfinished truth—a fragmented form of knowledge about the self. Drawing from family archives and oral histories, her work entails the piecing together of image and allegory. In so doing, Dass indexes intricacies of the collective past, prescribing meaning and gesture to the unavailable essence of moments captured in photographic archives. This sense of partial access to the past is palpable through the treatment of pictures; her cyanotypes rarely expose the entirety of the original composition. Instead, they fracture and fade and dissolve, reflecting the ruptures that accompany displacement and temporal distance. The image is necessarily broken, a reminder that the pictorial legacies of dispossessed people are often incongruous, requiring subsequent generations to make sense of how photographs (as containers of memory) comprehend cultural cosmology.
Rather than treating the archive as a fixed record, Dass understands it as a living repository for remembrance. Stories are retold, household fabrics are repaired, photographs are repeatedly handled, heirlooms transition from one home to another through rites of passage. These gestures, often performed in domestic spaces and directed by women, become acts of preservation. Embroidery embodies this rhythm of care: a slow, repetitive practice through which repair and remembrance become inseparable. The exhibition treats the home as the site in which familial memory is made and held, that sees the collision of images and objects imbued with social life— different yet equally significant markers of historical presence.
Viewers are invited to move through an environment assembled from fragments of homes, eliciting anamnesis through scent, touch, light, shadow, and texture. Combining assemblage and found object installation, Dass evokes experiences particular to diasporic Indian communities. A new series of work, featuring cyanotypes on found granite, alludes to the literal rubble of displacement tied up with histories of indenture, migration, and forced removals.
Inheritance (2026) introduces a constellation of jewellery boxes, referencing the transfer of precious objects and heirlooms in accordance with Indian dowry systems— a pillar of material legacy. Talismans and sacred idols, scattered amongst familial subjects, delineate a spiritual ground. Residues of the everyday reside at the surface; a stained curtain creates an open field in which blots of ink, thread, and gestures of wear transfuse.
Following Tina Campt’s provocation that we learn more about images when we listen to them, Dass deploys a diverse array of sensory methodologies to encourage a slow and attentive manner of engaging remnants of the past. The Inheritance of Loss sees the earnest application of her special aptitude for listening across multiple mediums, finding meaning in material form.
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