Kadari Art Gallery presents Remember Her Name, a research-led textile exhibition by artist and art historian Anitha N. Reddy. The exhibition brings together a sustained body of collaborative work developed with Siddi women quilters in Karnataka, foregrounding questions of historical erasure, diaspora, and collective memory through textile as both material and method.
Reddy’s practice emerges from long term engagement with the Siddi community, whose African ancestry is tied to centuries of migration across the Indian Ocean and the Deccan. Despite their enduring presence in South India, Siddi histories remain marginal within dominant cultural and institutional narratives. Remember Her Name responds to this absence by centering women’s knowledge systems, labour practices, and forms of authorship that have historically existed outside formal recognition.
The title Remember Her Name is drawn from the popular culture phrase “remember their names”, a formulation that has emerged globally as a confrontation of erasure and historical forgetting. By transforming this collective address into a singular and gendered invocation, the exhibition foregrounds the centrality of women within the transmission of knowledge, memory, and artistic labour. Remember Her Name functions as a call to action and an insistence on making visible those women and communities from whom artistic practices are often borrowed but rarely acknowledged. The title underscores the ethics of authorship embedded within the exhibition, emphasising art made through community, care, and continuity rather than extraction or individualisation.
Kadari Art Gallery
Kadari Art Gallery is a Hyderabad based contemporary art space committed to advancing regional artistic practices that engage critically with the social, cultural, and political realities of contemporary India. Since its founding, the gallery has foregrounded research driven exhibitions, long term artistic inquiry, and practices rooted in lived experience rather than spectacle.
Through an annual curatorial focus on regionally grounded contemporary art, Kadari Art Gallery seeks to challenge homogenising narratives shaped by mass production and surface revivalism. The gallery is invested in recognising forms of artistic labour that emerge through community, care, and continuity, and in positioning such practices firmly within the register of contemporary art. Its programming emphasises ethical collaboration, historical depth, and sustained engagement, contributing to broader national and international conversations on art, material culture, and social memory.
Curatorial Statement for Institutions and Biennales
Remember Her Name is a research led textile exhibition by artist and art historian Anitha N. Reddy, developed through long term collaboration with Siddi women quilters in Karnataka, India. Situated within the interdisciplinary field of Indian Ocean Studies, the project engages histories of mobility, forced and voluntary migration, and cultural exchange that have shaped the African diaspora in South Asia. Through textile practice, the exhibition examines how memory, labour, and authorship are transmitted outside written archives and dominant
historical narratives.
The Siddis are an African descended community whose presence in the Indian subcontinent is inseparable from the circulatory networks of the Indian Ocean world. These networks, shaped by trade, enslavement, military service, and courtly patronage, complicate linear colonial histories centred on Europe. Yet despite their deep historical presence, Siddi lives and cultural practices remain marginal within national historiographies and art historical canons. Reddy’s practice responds to this structural absence by foregrounding women’s knowledge systems and forms of labour that operate beyond colonial categories of authorship, originality, and individual mastery.
