SPINE/SPEAK
“mould the wing to match the photograph”:
The Mrinalini Mukherjee Archive in conversation with Sreshta Rit Premnath
Asia Art Archive in America, New York
January 31, 2025 – July 25, 2025

Artist Sreshta Rit Premnath was invited to respond to the Mrinalini Mukherjee archive for “mould the wing to match the photograph” via a selective juried process that began in 2024. All the works shown in the exhibition, collectively titled Spine Speak, are newly commissioned for presentation at AAAinA. 

At once human and vegetal in appearance, Mrinalini Mukherjee’s heavy, unwieldy weavings gradually transitioned from monumental murals to a more human scale. Their concealed armatures provided a precarious balance to the upright posture of the soft, knotted fiber, creating the illusion of defying gravity. Art historian Emilia Terracciano notes that Mukherjee repurposed “faulty orthopedic structures” scavenged from hospital dumps as armatures, further emphasizing the inseparable relationship between bodies and the structures that support them. In a similar vein, Sreshta Rit Premnath’s sculptures explore the architectural and ideological support systems that shape our bodies and influence our relationship to space.

In Two Tongues, a pair of sculptures by Sreshta Rit Premnath, two lozenge-shaped forms twist and unfold in space, cantilevered, propped, and partially suspended from the ceiling. Crafted from Aquaresin with burlap and encaustic wax—one of the oldest painting mediums—the sculptures have a fleshy, tactile quality, appearing at once rigid and soft. While they resemble two literal tongues, the title may also evoke the experience of a migrant navigating multiple languages and worlds. These works expand on Premnath’s ongoing series of “slumps”—figure-like forms made of foam and plaster.

A pair of pieces titled Passage is created by layering mulberry paper and cotton twine woven in the pattern of chain-link fences. The softness of twine and the fragile translucency of the paper suggest the intangibility of borders, which are often defined more by the allocation of rights than by physical barriers. The weavings are horizontal, like landscapes, and the negative spaces created by pulling apart the fence’s weave, and cutting away the paper can be seen as figurative elements—spaces through which a body may pass. While Mrinalini Mukherjee’s sculptures emphasize bodily presence–whether human or superhuman–the body only appears as an absence in Passage. Premnath’s “sign paintings” resemble exit signs, presenting pairs of words on the recto and verso of two-sided panels. Like the fence in Passage, an exit sign also marks a boundary and can be viewed as both a point of departure and arrival—leaving one place means arriving at another. These paintings are installed such that only one side can be viewed at a time, drawing as much attention to the gap that separates the words, as the poetic connection between them. These word pairs include SPINE/SPEAK, KNOT/KNOW, and TIED/TIME and reflect on the relation between craft, embodied process, and knowledge—themes that Mrinalini Mukherjee invokes in her lecture notes. She describes the process of knotting and weaving as a “language of tangential equivalences” that allows form to emerge from a process that is essentially improvisational and abstract. Premnath’s signs reflect on language and knowledge as forms of action and embodiment.