Artangel
Open
Longlist
https://www.artangel.org.uk/news/announcing-the-2025-artangel-open-longlist/
Juried by Freddie Opoku-Addaie, Nitin Sawhney, Zineb Sedira, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, and Mariam Zulfiqar
My proposal:
A drawing as an operatic environment, through a composition played on looms by weavers, block printers, and musicians, to consider mark-making as a collective experience. This performance would become an installation as sound would echo through swathes of yardage hanging and draping, some adorned with mirrors, in an environment that replicates a block printer's workshop. The performance considers the idea of Kabir - the 14th Century poet-weaver-mystic - as an unarchivable myth, and a chorus of authors.
Sobey Art Award Exhibition
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Oct 3, 2025-Feb 8, 2026
Library, 2025
Mirrored cabinets, dropcloths with machine cut mirrors
Vantage Point, 2025
digital collage
Photo: ST
Born in Canada, Swapnaa Tamhane has always maintained close ties to her cultural heritage from India. It fuels her practice, which is focused on drawing in its broadest sense. She has been devoting herself to artistic production since 2017, following a detour through art history and curating that helped shape an approach rooted in research and the transmission of narratives. The history of materials, political history and family histories come together in Tamhane’s work, which can be seen as part of the resurgence of materiality and process that has been occurring in contemporary art over the past fifteen years or so.
Her art is political in that it brings together the languages of art, craft and design. By allowing these forms to coexist within the same work, she creates a tension that challenges, from a decolonial perspective, the cultural assumptions that underpin our aesthetic judgements. Her exploration of the impact of colonization on India and the country after Partition and Independence is guided by the skills and materials employed by its artisans. It is these materials – fibre, pulp, indigo – and Indian vernacular techniques – block printing on fabric, mirror embroidery, the design and construction of mud houses – that interest her and prompt her to question the distinction between art and decoration.
- Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre
Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Curator of Quebec and Canadian Contemporary Art
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
SPACES THAT HOLD
Mead Art Museum
Amherst College, MA
August 28, 2025 - January 4, 2026
Sorting the world into binaries - black or white, masculine or feminine, Eastern or Western - obscures the rich and varied complexities that exist between them. Swapnaa Tamhane (b. 1976, Toronto, Canada) explores these liminal and often overlooked spaces, blurring the boundaries between art, architecture, craft, and design. Her process is profoundly collaborative, and emphasizes the presence of the hand in drawing, making paper, the treatment of surfaces, and the production of lush, immersive environments. Employing traditional South Asian materials and techniques, she complicates the popular notion that tradition and modernity are opposed to each other, while also laying bare the troubled histories of labor, class, and colonialism that mark the Indian Subcontinent and so many other parts of the world. Tamhane's works challenge visitors to engage deeply and critically with their sublime beauty as well as the historical shadows that haunt them.Designed with the intention of welcoming everyone, Spaces That Hold insists that meaning is shaped not just by an object but through the viewer's willingness to engage, question, and become a part of the experience.
Curated by Siddhartha V. Shah, John Wieland 1958 Director of the Mead Art Museum
https://www.amherst.edu/museums/mead/exhibitions/2025/spaces-that-hold-swapnaa-tamhane