What We Carry

Group Exhibition «What We Carry»
12 July – 6 September, 2025
Artists: Ousmane Bâ, Surabhi Ghosh, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Baseera Khan, Luciano Maia
Patel Brown Gallery 21 Wade Ave, Unit 2, Toronto, Canada

What We Carry explores how identity is not fixed but continually shaped —stitched together from memory, inheritance, and the tactile presence of materials. Through abstraction, layering, surface, and spatial composition, each work becomes a site where identity is constructed not as a singular truth, but as a process formed through encounter, gesture, repetition, and time.

Patterns, textures, and mythologies are called upon not to define, but to unfix and unravel the illusion of a stable self and to challenge inherited structures of meaning. The material itself becomes both subject and medium: fabric, pigment, paper, and form are used to carry stories that are often felt more than told. These works invite us to consider how knowledge moves not through language alone, but through ritual, through repetition, through the quiet memory of touch.

The body, whether present, implied, or absent, anchors these investigations. It becomes both container and transmitter, absorbing cultural codes and reflecting personal, political, and spiritual histories. Across the exhibition, viewers move between what is kept and what is transformed, what is known and what resists naming.

Rather than offering identity as something to be resolved, the works gathered here affirm its multiplicity. They evoke a sense of lineage without prescription, and of transformation without finality. In this space, identity is not a destination, but a passage: an ongoing practice of assembling, unmaking, and remaking.

Excerpt and photography from www.patelbrown.com