Suchitra Mattai’s largest solo exhibition to date will feature all new work, including major site-specific installations. The exhibition is a significant exploration of generational history and memories, both personal and universal. Mattai was born in Georgetown, Guyana, before immigrating to Canada as a young child. The history of her family—Indian immigrants brought to work as indentured laborers in Guyana—deeply influences her practice. She often uses techniques like embroidery, weaving, and crocheting to honor their labor.

The exhibition centers around a major large-scale hanging sculpture that reimagines Mattai’s family home in Guyana. The home installation will be draped in Mattai’s signature sari tapestries, this time including references to tropical Caribbean landscapes and South Asian architecture. Visitors are invited to go on a journey slipping between the interior and exterior of both domestic space and the self.

Mattai is also creating a new series of found furniture sculptures. She disembowels chairs, excises the centers of tables or bureaus, and fills these spaces with anthropomorphized woven forms that are simultaneously abject, humorous, and unsettling. These forms become the imagined figurative inhabitants of the space. Surrounding the house sculpture, they continue an experiential inversion of exterior and interior, spilling the imagined domestic space into the gallery. Crafted from vintage furniture and sari fabric, these pieces carry the untold stories of the people, families, and communities who lived with and loved them.