Jamdani becomes conceptual anchor in ‘unraveling silence’

Unravelling Silence brings together a body of work that reflects artist Yasmin Jahan Nupur's ongoing engagement with memory, displacement, and the quiet resilience embedded in everyday life.

The exhibition unfolds through soft sculptures, textiles, and immersive installations that draw on the material history of Jamdani and the emotional landscapes woven around it.

For Nupur, textiles function as carriers of intimate and collective stories. Across the exhibition, suspended weavings, layered fabric panels, and ghostlike garments create an atmosphere where absence feels present and silence becomes an active force. The works suggest movement yet remain still, alluding to unsettled journeys, fragile inheritances, and the delicate architectures of home.

The artist's relationship with place—its fractures, tenderness, and shifting boundaries—runs quietly throughout the show. Concrete textures, open floor spaces, and translucent cloths evoke both shelter and uncertainty. Visitors encounter lines of text embedded into fabric, drawn from personal and shared narratives. These fragments read like internal monologues held beneath the surface: unresolved, half-whispered, and weighted with lived experience.

Jamdani, with its centuries-old lineage in Bangladesh, appears not as ornament but as a conceptual anchor. Its slow, labour-intensive, communal weaving process mirrors the emotional cadence of the works. Through it, Nupur examines themes of labour, identity, and cultural memory—and how fragile materials often carry histories long after they are forgotten.

Rather than leading viewers to a single conclusion, Unravelling Silence opens a contemplative space. The installations invite slow looking and encourage visitors to consider how silence functions in their own lives: as protection, erasure, resistance, or a repository for unspoken stories.

Curated by Tanzim Wahab and inaugurated at Bengal Shilpalay, the exhibition is deeply responsive to the raw, unfinished textures of the space. The works engage with the architecture, amplifying the tension between delicacy and solidity that runs throughout the show.

Nupur's practice has long navigated the intersection of intimacy and spatial experience. With Unravelling Silence, she deepens her exploration of emotional inheritances—those passed down quietly from one generation to the next.

For feature writers, the exhibition offers multiple angles: the politics of memory, the evolution of contemporary textile art in Bangladesh, the psychology of displacement, the transformation of Jamdani in modern practice, or the sensory experience within the gallery.

Unravelling Silence is open to visitors at Bengal Shilpalay until 22 November 2025, from 4pm to 8pm daily except Sunday.