Anjali Kasturi | Lamina

19 July - 13 September

Side by side along the gallery wall—like filmstrip, like vertebrae, like architectural blueprints softened by flood—each work is a fragment of tension. The wax objects do not perform narrative; they suggest memory’s outer crust, holding the impressions of vanished interiors: a door that forgot where it led, a ribcage where the map once was. They are devotional and forensic. Their stillness is charged.

Time slows here. The palette—vegetal greens, antiseptic pinks, rusted violets—hints at preservation gone wrong. A false embalming. Objects not saved, but paused. Each surface resists final form: maps rupture, windows collapse inward, and even the most figurative scenes seem scraped away mid-sentence.

Several paintings exist in conversation with stained glass pieces and wax sculptures along the wall. Fourth Mansion anchors the room in a kind of temporal dilation — interior space thick with afterimage, neither sacred nor secular, just paused, an aftermath. While the diptych Rehearsal for a Disappearance enacts a play in two parts: an echo and a refusal, two halves of a departure - one bodily, one atmospheric, a dusty jet lag where the soul is left behind.

They are tethered as if by the tendons of a forgotten language. Scratches and smears act as half-written inscriptions defying perspective where figures are in procession, distorted, warping the scale of intimacy and distance. Buildings lose their edges, as in Elegy of Bricks and Three People, where landscape collapses into flat planes, foreground and background stitched together. Together, these works challenge the authority of the viewer’s gaze. They offer no fixed position but rather shifting roles, mirror images seen through hazy layers. Visions of bodies drawn, erased, redrawn in a recollection of memories. The show doesn’t perform resolution; it circles around affect, asking what it means for a work to remember its own making. Or to forget it completely. It hung there, bound to the wall as if lashed by the sinews of an unseen god. Charcoal fingers had clawed at it, etched their whispers into its skin - a house piled on top of a house, Isis dissolving into shadow. From its edges, silver ribs stretched outward grown in defiance of its own captivity, the gleaming bones of sun-bleached carcasses or the ceremonial adornments of a forgotten priest each streak forcing shape upon chaos.

Anjali Kasturi

Anjali Kasturi (b.1996, Canada) lives and works in Montreal, Canada. She received her BFA from Central Saint-Martins, London in 2019. Kasturi’s multi-disciplinary practice blends drawing, painting and sculptural elements to navigate the fragile intersections of memory and transformation. With a focus on texture and materiality, Anjali employs translucent surfaces, muted tones, and delicate carved line-work, creating pieces that seem suspended between states of being. Each work draws from personal experiences, resonating with universal themes of love and loss. Her imagery ranges from ghostly figures to symbolic forms abstracted to invite the viewer into a state of introspection. Recent exhibitions include Isolde, Locale Durocher, Montreal, Canada, 2024; A Coin on a Tongue, Espace Maurice, Montreal, Canada, 2023; La certitude est en jeu, Espace Loulou, Montreal, Canada,2023; The Weaver’s House, Strangefield, Glasgow, UK, 2023; Projet Serrure, Exposition ephemere, Montreal, Canada, 2023; l’heure du conte, Pangée, Montreal, Canada.

SELECTED WORKS