Æquo is pleased to announce the opening of its new exhibition, What Remains. The show brings together Santa Gaia Pilens and Inderjeet Sandhu through two practices concerned with transformation, and with what persists through it.
Across textile and shell, the exhibition considers matter as a carrier of memory. A surface retains a gesture, a fragment bears the forces that shaped it, an ancient narrative survives through a sign. Rather than preserving origins intact, both practices explore how they endure through transformation.
The exhibition unfolds in three moments.
It begins with three original works by Santa Gaia Pilens, drawn from the language of her textile murals. Figures, animals, symbols and gestures emerge from mythology, folk traditions and collective memory, moving freely between ancient narratives and personal interpretation. Bodies merge with animals, hands become wings, while references ranging from Inanna and Salomé to the symbolic intensity of Tintoretto’s Venetian cycles surface as traces of stories carried through time.
What remains once a story has been stripped of its literal narrative? Myth becomes gesture, the figure becomes sign. Working with raw linen and shellac, Santa Gaia Pilens shapes and distresses the textile from its reverse through pressure and counterforms, allowing images to emerge from within the fibre. She describes these works as “contemporary mummies”: surfaces that cover, transform and ultimately reveal an underlying essence.
A fourth work marks a transition.
Developed through Santa Gaia Pilens’ collaboration with Æquo and embroidery ateliers in Mumbai, it brings this language into contact with another culture of making. Embroidery follows, interrupts and extends the signs already present in the shellac-treated linen. Sitting between what was and what is yet to come, the work retains Santa Gaia Pilens’ original language while announcing a new body of works being developed with Æquo over the coming year.
From the survival of an image to the survival of matter. For his second residency with Æquo, Dutch designer of Indian origin Inderjeet Sandhu continues Tidal Fragments, a series rooted in the history of shell and mother-of-pearl craftsmanship in India. Its starting point is a coastal landscape where shells, carried, broken and polished by tides over time, accumulated in such abundance that craftspeople settled nearby and began working them as raw material.
Sandhu begins with what the landscape has left behind. Fragments shaped by water, wind and time are gathered and assembled into vessels and sculptural forms. Their irregular contours remain visible; fractures and organic edges become part of the objects rather than imperfections to be erased. Each piece carries evidence of what the material was before it became something else.
Placed together, Santa Gaia Pilens and Inderjeet Sandhu approach the idea of the remnant from two directions. What Remains lies somewhere within this movement: what a story, a gesture or a material carries forward after transformation, altered, but never entirely erased.
