Anshu Singh

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River of Sweat, 2023

Mai Kashi ka Julaha, 2024 

Mai Kashi ka Julaha commissioned in 2024 by Lahore Biennale Foundation

Anshu Singh (b. 1989) is an artist-weaver from a rare matriarchal weaving family in the holy city of Varanasi (Banaras), where typically women are not allowed to work directly on looms. Singh earned her BA and MFA at Banaras Hindu University, and her work merges artistic expression with traditional artisan techniques, incorporating unconventional materials and cloth waste into creations, and emphasizing artisans’ creative capacities. Singh has exhibited at the first edition of sā Ladakh and the Rencontres de Bamako (both 2023). This is her first time exhibiting in Pakistan.

Mai Kashi Ka Julaha (“I am a weaver of Kashi”) is a citation of the poet-saint Kabir created in textile by women weavers from waste materials, such as remaindered threads and fabric scraps, gathered from Varanasi’s clothing industry. Varanasi (Banares), formerly known as Kashi, was the birthplace of the mystic Kabir, revered by Sufis and Hindus alike, whose key teachings included the abolition of religious difference.  He also rejected caste systems, identifying himself as a weaver. In aligning Kashi’s philosophy with the struggle of women laborers for recognition, many of them Muslim, Singh’s work critiques multiple hierarchies even as it affirms other possibilities.  Displayed in the grand staircase of the YMCA, historically a seat of progressive social movements in Lahore, its message reverberates with both past and present.

Meanwhile, Singh’s River of Sweat beckons beautifully in the Mughal splendor of Shalimar Garden Hammam, its weave a marvel of technique and painstaking labor.  At the same time, its colorful strands have been constituted together from recycled sarees that would have otherwise ended up as landfill.  The piece stands as a reminder of costs of fast fashion, the world’s second-largest polluting industry, for both the environment and craftspeople.  In an era of insatiable consumerism, that garments, however beguiling, can entail what the artist has deemed a “river of blood, sweat, and tears.”