Meera Sethi: Cotton Exchange

The works presented in Cotton Exchange use the concept of image reproduction or ‘copying’ to focus on and disrupt assumptions related to the labouring bodes involved in cloth and garment manufacturing. In her newest painting series, Cotton Exchange, Meera Sethi translates into painting a 1936 Art Deco bas relief sculpture found on the exterior of the historic Cotton Exchange Building in Mumbai. In Articles of Clothing, Sethi reverses the process of fast fashion and the news cycle by engaging in a slow, durational process of drawing the clothing of protesting garment workers. By looking at the colonial period and present-day garment industries together this exhibition illustrates the exploitation at the heart of what we wear.   

Cotton Exchange is one of two exhibitions featuring the work of artist, Meera Sethi. Sethi's exhibition Outerwhere is on view at the Queen's Square gallery.    

About the Artist: Meera Sethi is a contemporary artist with an intuitive and research-based practice that moves across painting, drawing, fibre, illustration, performance, and social practice. Her work sits at the intersection of the subjugated body and histories of cloth with a particular focus on South Asia and it’s diasporas. She is interested in the making, wearing, and disposing of cloth; clothing as a form of self-expression and resistance; and the ways by which textile is constituted over vast geographies. Through her work, she delves deep into our understanding of the self, the body, cloth and clothing, including it’s histories, resonances, and possibilities.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and can be found in the permanent collection of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Wedge Collection. She lives and works in the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, and Mississaugas of the Credit River.