Mending Inheritances: Between Artistic and Institutional Care

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A conversation on inherited materials, care, conservation, and the possibilities of repair in personal inheritances and institutional practices.

Museums and artists come to and care for cultural belongings in very different ways. While museums collect, inherit, and conserve through institutional frameworks, artists may engage materials inherited through familial relationships and lived forms of care. What kinds of responsibility, forms of repair, and knowledge emerge from these different relationships to inherited materials? Where do artistic and institutional practices align, and where do they fundamentally differ?

On the occasion of the exhibition Archive of Divine Possessions, artist Bhasha Chakrabarti joins conservator Marika Kesler for a public conversation at TA T. Taking Chakrabarti’s exhibition as a point of departure, the discussion explores questions of care, repair, conservation, material histories, and the possibilities and limits of preserving fragile inheritances.

Archive of Divine Possessions brings together textiles and devotional materials from Chakrabarti’s family heritage, which she explores through acts of archiving, painting, collage, moving image, and spatial arrangement. The exhibition opens up questions around touch, transformation, preservation, and the changing meanings materials acquire across generations and contexts.

The conversation will take place within the exhibition.

Participants

Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991) is a visual artist from Honolulu, Hawaii. By crossing many genres, her practice engages art-making as a mode of discourse. Her work generates dialogues between subaltern tropes and feminine forms of labour from the global South and the agendas of resistance movements of marginalised communities in the global North.
Chakrabarti graduated with an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2022. The artist has exhibited in solo and group shows at the Kochi Biennale (India), Rhode Island School of Design Museum (USA), Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh), British Textile Biennial (UK), Experimenter (India), Portland Museum of Art (USA), and the Museum of Art and Photography (India). Chakrabarti was the recipient of the 2023 South Asia Artist Prize (SAAI), awarded by the University of California, Berkeley.

Marika Kesler, conservator at the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK), specialises in the conservation and care of textile collections at Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum. Working closely with culturally significant materials and their histories of use, preservation, and repair, she brings a distinctive perspective to questions of care and material inheritance. Together, Chakrabarti and Kesler will reflect on different ways of engaging with inherited materials, from intimate and familial relationships to institutional conservation practices, and discuss how artistic and museum approaches may diverge, overlap, and learn from one another.

Moderator: Felix Sattler, Head Curator of TA T.

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