‘Goa last night I dreamed I touched you…today it dissipates’, is an exploration of familial archives as place(s) of personal loss, possibility, and all the fleeting moments in between. Curated by Hajra Karrar, the show forms an integral part of Jovita Alvares’ broader oeuvre, exploring these themes within the context of the extensive history of the Goan Christian community in Karachi. Upon entering the gallery, one is immediately enveloped by an atmosphere reminiscent of the sea. It lies in the subtle shift of the fabric installations— as if caught in a gentle breeze—  and lingers in the textures, intimacies and layers of photographs and objects displayed in the exhibition space. Memories drift much like tides; retreating, crashing, becoming anew. Each movement converges different worlds. Gaps and erasures flow through personal reflections about the past. At times, the grief of fragmentation reverberates as the loudest voice; at other moments, her work seems to depict a crossing of a threshold, where the spirits of the present and the ghosts of the past come together to forge an uncharted path.

By rendering the photographs through multiple processes, Alvares highlights the diverse roles she assumes in exploring personal and collective history. She simultaneously archives, listens, bears witness, and shapes memory, with the material processes serving as vessels for these various embodiments. The imperfections, uncertainties, and the ‘fingerprints and scratches’ within these processes are not signs of failing to recover memory but rather ways of understanding its multiplicity. These processes also embody the fluidity of memory—the way it shifts and transforms when encountered, resisting attempts to fix it in place or perceive it as a complete, stable entity.

The experimentation process, in the relief sculptures, video projection, archival prints, and cyanotypes, creates layers of exposure, emphasizing particular relations, touch, movement, tensions, and at some point becomes a confession of complicity in both erasing and obscuring as well. The photographs and the remnants of the stories are reflective of what survives, while compelling the audience to consider the true cost of what endures. By highlighting the scratches, visible marks, and fading, she not only documents her encounter with an existing archive but also prompts us to reflect on what it truly means to ‘know’ our histories. The artist alluded to this in her talk when she spoke about the collective experience of the Goan community, the past she seeks answers from is a time when her ancestors were engaged in a survival mode. Similar to the photographic process that oscillates between obscuring and exposing, the experience of displacement is not just a physical movement, but also a displacement of memory and language—a series of subtle negotiations with memory to release certain parts of oneself while holding others more tightly—and perhaps there is no single, definitive way to achieve this. To me, this tension of holding and layering memory deeply resonates with Zarina Hashmi’s work.

In the slow fading of a family photograph through fabric, or the deliberate marks that never attempt to erase the process of making, there’s a shared refusal to fix or resolve. And simultaneously an attempt to make room for the memory to live and breathe within its contradictions. Hashmi carved displacement into paper while Alvares lets it move across light, textile, and breath. Both carry a tenderness toward what cannot be fully recovered. The quiet in their work is not merely absence, but the presence of grief, longing, and something half-remembered still unfolding into form.

In the layered fabric hanging at the center of the gallery, a family photograph gradually diminishes with each additional layer; there is a sense that every conversation with her aunt, every encounter with a memory, might reclaim a lost fragment, yet simultaneously renders it distant and unreachable. The careful curation of the space and the deliberate placement of the fabric create an immersive experience, guiding the audience through passages that traverse boundaries—into the artist’s intimate dialogues with the archive, with colonial legacies, and with herself.

However, amid the erasure and ongoing collective violence inflicted upon minorities long after migration, there remains a persistent presence of memory and life, embodied in the fleeting moments and subtle contours of domestic spaces. Amidst that grief, Alvares continues to weave a thread connecting to the ‘ancestors of an unknown faith.’ Where Konkani becomes less present on tongues, it embeds itself deeply in the contours of domestic spaces. It exists in the curation of objects specific to a Goan home, and while the meanings and significance of these objects are intended for an intimate gaze, their positioning relative to one another also suggests a readiness to be perceived. The deliberate way a lace doily drapes a corner of the house, the speckled light softly softening the edges of a room, and the careful placement of family photographs on a shelf that requires you to crane your neck—all these elements, along with the shadows that harbor ghosts of another time and a song that fills the space with longing, reveal a shared history woven through these fragments. When brought into the gallery’s space, this history can almost be felt in the gentle sea breeze that carries across the distance—momentarily pierced, yet stretching out endlessly once again.

While her own body seems to be an integral part of her practice, more overtly in the series Can I be grounded? If the soil refuses to accept me, if it repels me? And I hover, non belonger?, Alvares’ also acknowledges the voices of those who have carried these stories to her. Her aunt, who is central to the entire process of recovering and even provoking these histories, casts a shadow in the first gallery room during her visit to the opening of the show. Her shadow merges with a wall painted by Alvares, tracing the outline of a room that once was— and in this moment, her presence makes it possible for this fleeting, ephemeral encounter across time to take shape. Though subtle and perhaps unnoticed by most in the space, the connection persists, occurring nonetheless.

In all these moments of intimacy, within the contours of private grief, the collective’s voice is continually present. Alvares ventures beyond the limitations of attempting to transport the audience to the exact moment where displacement occurred, or erasure began within the timeline of Portuguese colonization. Instead, she explores how far this displacement extends—their edges and peripheries—as the community engages with a new place and navigates fresh negotiations to preserve their culture. By focusing on everyday life, she evokes a deeper sense of time spanning across seas, while simultaneously bringing the reader into close contact with a more immediate, lived temporal experience.  This possibility of being both solidary and solitary, is one Eduardo Glissant dwells on as “the repercussions of cultures, whether in symbiosis or conflict— in a polka, we might say, or in a laghia— in domination or liberation, opening before us an unknown forever both near and deferred, their lines of force occasionally divined, only to vanish instantly. Leaving us to imagine their interaction and shape it at the same time: to dream or to act” (Glissant, 157).

Within the remembering and mis-remembering that Alvarez oscillates between, she continues to search for and emphasize the rhythms that carry memory forth— whether it unravels in part, whole or altered. There remains a sense, both in thematic and material exploration, that each of these personal fragments she encounters serves as an opening. Each meeting with this sometimes imperfect or unreliable archive also signifies an expansion of what it means to know, and the countless ways to traverse an immeasurable distance.

“Goa last night I dreamed I touched you…today it dissipates”, a solo exhibition of Jovita Alvares was displayed at Canvas Gallery, Karachi, from 4^th March 2025 till 13th March 2025

Title Image: ‘Lived Room’, wall paint, 122 x 174 inches, 2025

All Images, courtesy Maham Chiragh

References:

Alvares, Jovita. Nonbelonger?  Artist Book, 2025
Karrar, Hajra. Piercing Time and Distance: Jovita Alvares Preserving the incompleteness of the Past. Curatorial note, 2025
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor Univ. Of Michigan Press, 1997