Roshni Kavate a Violeta Ortega Navarrete
topologies of resistance: altars of memory body place
Curated by Monika Pádejová
Exhibition opening: May 20, 2025 / 7.00 PM
Exhibition duration: May 21 – May 29, 2025
Šopa Gallery, Hlavná 40, Košice
Opening hours:
WED – FRI / 3.00 – 6.00 PM
SAT / 1.00 – 6.00 PM
“To weave is to remember. To eat is to know. To build an altar is to return home.”
The exhibition topologies of resistance: altars of memory body place presents a sensorial installation shaped through slowness, intimacy, and transformation, developed during a two-month residency by artists Roshni Kavate and Violeta Ortega Navarrete in Košice.
The intersection of both artists’ practices lies in their shared interest in working with textiles as a medium of care and return, not in the nostalgic sense, but as an act of reconnection or reactivation of memory, linking back to their Indigenous lineages from India and Mexico. This connection reflects ancestral knowledge stored in the body, in gestures, or within the structure of the fabric itself.
In their creative process, the authors have long observed a persistent connection between eco-feminist thinking, anthropological sensibility and ritual practice. These are not abstract frameworks, but lived and embodied experiences—reflected in using natural materials as carriers of stories and cycles, interweaving individual and collective memory, and ritual as a means of artistic expression, healing, remembrance, and reconnection.
The altar emerges as a central symbolic and spatial element of the installation. Informed by Mexican and Indian traditions, the altar is conceived as an intimate, spiritual site—a bridge between the personal and the collective, the visible and the invisible. Simultaneously, it functions as an embodied archive: through scent, sound, silence, and the arrangement of objects, it holds and activates memory.
In this context, the altar is not sacred in a conventional religious sense—it sanctifies the everyday: weaving, storytelling, foraging, remembering, grieving. It becomes a space where emotions are made tangible, and the viewer’s presence transforms the space into a collective ritual. The altar becomes an altar through our presence.
The installation is structured as a multi-sensory environment, a living organism composed of memory, body, and place. Memory—woven, cyclical, shaped by the rhythm of words and hands. Body—assembled through gesture, knots, touch, and scent. Place—a site for solitude and community, contemplation and togetherness.
The artists used regenerated wool and natural pigments from local plants (dandelion and nettle) gathered around Košice. Other components—such as textile ribbons hand-dyed with natural pigments—emerged from participatory sessions with the local community. The resulting textiles become not only archives of the local landscape, but also of the body and memory of each participant. They form a language, a trace, a subtle act of resistance.
Roshni Kavate expands the work through the lens of nostalgic futurism—a speculative framework that resists linear time by weaving together past and future. In this view, weaving becomes an act of resistance, making and maintaining space for what is fragile, uncertain, and vital. Grief is not a conclusion, but a portal. Care is not an outcome, but a method.
This exhibition is, above all, an invitation: to gather, to listen, to remember, to share presence. It is not about returning but about reconfiguring a new topology of memory, body, and place.
Monika Pádejová
VIOLETA ORTEGA NAVARRETE (MX) studied Hispanic Literature at the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM) and Textile Design at the School of Design of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL). She has specialized in artisanal textile techniques such as tapestry weaving, gobelin, felting, embroidery, flat weaving, and knitting, among others. She employs these traditionally feminine mediums to explore inner worlds, contemplation, and self-knowledge through the act of weaving and textile experimentation. In 2020, she co-founded Islera, an independent space for artistic experimentation and cultural cooperation located in the La Merced neighborhood in Mexico City.
ROSHNI KAVATE (IN/US) is a multidisciplinary artist emerging from a lineage of South Indian artisanal weavers whose practice intricately weaves investigations of memory, ecology, and diaspora. Trained initially as a palliative care nurse, Kavate’s work explores the profound cartographies of grief, belonging and the body through textile, printmaking, and video installations and immersive research, drawing from ancestral technologies of oral and gestural memory. Her artistic methodology—which she terms “nostalgic futurism”—reimagines postcolonial narratives through whimsical and contemplative explorations of belonging, care and creating living archives that challenge traditional representations of cultural identity.
Roshni is also part of the Barcelona based collective Mango and Okra, the collective engages in radical inquiry and reimagination of diasporic journeys through culinary storytelling and documenting forgotten realities and creating post-colonial futures. It’s a collaboration between Agnes Essonti Luque, Lizette Nin and Roshni Kavate. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including notable presentations at MACBA Cuina in Barcelona, the Off Dakar Biennial, and spaces across Los Angeles and San Francisco. She is a studio artist at Tangent Projects studios in Barcelona.
The residency program is supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.