UMass Studio Art Department Professors Mahwish Chishty and Roopa Vasudevan are participating in Personal Structures: Confluences in Venice, an exhibition presented in parallel with this year's La Biennale di Venezia. Their work will be on view during the Biennial at Palazzo Mora.
Tanka Tales: Thread as Archive
Professor Chishty will be exhibiting her project Tanka Tales: Thread As Archive, which was specifically conceived for this international exhibition and will feature labor-intensive, hand-embroidered panels made by women in Pakistan.
This transnational, research-based installation examines craft, memory, borders, and material culture through Punjabi embroidery traditions. The project approaches embroidery as a living archive of women’s labor and cultural transmission, using hand stitching as both visual language and narrative structure. Each embroidered work functions as a fragment, a “tanka,” an Urdu word meaning stitch or repair, accumulating into a nonlinear archive shaped by repetition, gesture, and embodied labor.
Engaging regional embroidery practices sustained by women, the work foregrounds stitching as both adornment and a record of lived experience, care, and collective memory. Developed through close collaboration with Pakistani women artisans, the project documents and revitalizes these traditions within a contemporary art framework. Artisans contribute words and narratives stitched directly into the surface, where text and thread become inseparable, forming a shared, evolving narrative.
The visual compositions draw from textiles in Western Massachusetts museum collections as well as Indian miniature painting, allowing traditional forms to be reinterpreted across time and geography. In this way, the project creates a dialogue between past and present, local and transnational, personal and collective histories.
Project production was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Many thanks to Dr. Umer Hameed for hosting this project at the National Textile University in Faisalabad.
Learn more: https://personalstructures.com/participants/mahwish-chishty/
Core Memory
Professor Vasudevan exhibits a new, site-specific iteration of her work Core Memory, designed for Palazzo Mora's unique architecture. Core Memory is an exploration of the things that artificial intelligence is incapable of understanding about the individual human experience, and its futile attempts to fill in the gaps it leaves behind. The project looks at the facets of lived experience that are omitted or neglected when we assume a one-to-one parallel between human and machine intelligence. By examining this metaphor in a careful and considered way, the artist aims to uncover assumptions implied within about what is and is not valued about humanity, and to question whether AI is truly as “intelligent” as it is thought to be.
For this work, Vasudevan runs personal photographs from her archive (originally taken between 2012 and 2018) through an automated alt-text generator, and systematically removes content based on what is left out of or misinterpreted by the description. The resulting gaps are then filled utilizing Content-Aware Fill, a computer vision tool that has been present in Adobe Photoshop since 2010. The generated caption is displayed against the manipulated imagery, calling attention to what is not present in the final image.
The title refers to the pop psychological concept of “core” memories—deeply personal memories that are widely imagined to shape and define who you are throughout your life—as well as the computational concept of “core memory,” which refers to how information is distilled into binary 0s and 1s and stored in a computer system.
Vasudevan's ongoing work on Core Memory is supported by a 2026 Faculty Research Grant from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Learn more: https://personalstructures.com/participants/roopa-vasudevan/