Suchitra Mattai
By Anh-Minh Le
In her solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Suchitra Mattai renders memories into vibrant mixed-media creations that reflect her Indo-Caribbean heritage in their materials and motifs.
“The whole exhibition is about how we remember,” Mattai told the Chronicle before the opening reception of her exhibition in June. “If you think of memory as ephemeral — as fragmented, as chosen — we sometimes choose what we want to remember and what we want to forget. There’s a breaking and a building of forms and ideas.”
In “She Walked in Reverse and Found Their Songs,” on view through Sept. 15, the 51-year-old artist even weaves her family’s narrative into the works, including exploring the legacy of colonialism and migration.
Mattai’s ancestors were brought to Guyana by the British from India to work as indentured laborers. She was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and her family moved to Nova Scotia, Canada, when she was 3. Now living in Los Angeles, she has yet to return to her homeland. By leaning on recollections, photographs and shared stories, the result is a striking meld of the factual and the fantastical.
At the center of the exhibition, “Pappy’s house” is a reimagining of her maternal grandparents’ home in Guyana. Roughly a thousand worn saris, cut into strips, comprise the 18-by-9-foot structure that stands 9 feet high on stilts. The facade’s woven design evokes the domes in Indian architecture, while its “thatched” roof is constructed of gold tinsel — ornamentation commonly seen at Caribbean Carnival celebrations.
“A lot of the tapestries I make are wall-based,” said Mattai, who often repurposes saris, many gifted from family and friends. “I had been thinking about how to transform that work — the scale of that work — into something new.”
Just as memories are not entirely accessible, “Pappy’s house” cannot be entered. Conceived as “a repository of dreams and memory,” Mattai said, it is in direct conversation with the show’s other major installation, “Memory Palace,” named after a mnemonic approach that entails visualizing a location. Mattai manifested the interior of her grandparents’ abode to surreal effect. Woven and braided saris combine with embellished found furniture, including a Louis XV-style armchair that now sprouts a purple-and-gold Indian processional umbrella plucked from a Goodwill store.
Four 13-foot-tall panels composed of woven saris appear as striped wallpaper; close inspection reveals myriad patterns on the saris themselves. The backdrop is interrupted by a trio of screens that mimic windows and display footage of the Atlantic Ocean. Filmed by Mattai, the video references her ancestors’ migration from northeast India to Guyana.
Indians’ arrival in Guyana to work on colonial sugar plantations dates to 1838. When she was growing up, Mattai’s elders were reluctant to discuss this traumatic aspect of their familial history, and both sets of grandparents have long passed away. In “She Walked in Reverse and Found Their Songs,” her piecing together of information — gathered from relatives and also researched — is conveyed through fragmented components.
“One of the visions for the museum is bringing significant voices into our arts ecosystem that help us expand the canon for the future and help us navigate critical social, political and cultural issues,” said ICA SF founding director Ali Gass, who was introduced to Mattai’s practice in 2020 during a virtual Art Basel Miami Beach presentation. “Suchitra has this amazing ability to speak through color and composition.”
Pointing to the recontextualizing of vintage saris and furniture, as well as the symbolic use of horizon lines, Gass described the exhibition as “a looking back at history, to find our place in the world, and a looking out at the future — potentially forging a very different future.”
In the light-filled entry of the industrial building that houses the museum in the Dogpatch neighborhood, viewers are greeted by an orange wall with introductory text. Next, floating on an expanse of white, is “the guide.” Four salvaged carved wood segments, reminiscent of Indian palace doors, are arranged on the wall like a portal. In the middle hangs a tapestry of saris, punctuated by a gold medallion with a female character, possibly a deity.
Mythology is a recurring theme for Mattai. The ICA SF show’s title work is a found tapestry depicting the Roman goddess Diana. Using embroidery floss, Mattai darkened the figure’s skin and hair (“a Brown reclamation,” she said). Bindis, beads, sari fabric and faux gems further the piece’s metamorphosis, allowing a new heroine to emerge.
Notably, although she is a painter — with an MFA in painting and drawing and a master of arts degree in South Asia studies from the University of Pennsylvania — the exhibition is void of any paintings. “I wanted to focus on processes that I learned through my family or materials that were familiar to my family,” explained Mattai, whose grandmothers taught her to embroider and sew. Not only do her techniques nod to female forebears and domestic activities, but specific elements do, too; plaits, for example, represent the mother-daughter ritual of hair-braiding.
Mattai’s 10 new works, from 2023 and 2024, essentially occupy one vast room at the ICA SF.
“We knocked down a bunch of walls because we didn’t want them to define your path through the space,” Gass said of the experience for viewers. “It’s like the way memory works: You encounter these different bits and pieces as you go, and then things start to come together as a whole.”