Artist Database

Alka Dass is a transdisciplinary artist based in Durban, South Africa, whose work intricately weaves storytelling, memory, and identity. Using cyanotypes, thread, found materials, and personal archives, she explores themes of belonging and migration. Dass employs techniques often dismissed as craft, such as embroidery and beadwork, to create layered, symbolic works that tap into the subconscious and examine the fragility and strength of human experience.

Her exhibition The Blue House invites viewers into an intimate world of family photographs and personal ephemera, where everyday moments are reimagined through tactile, immersive
installations. These works challenge dominant archival narratives, exploring colonial histories, memory, and place through fragmented, stitched compositions. By blending cyanotype’s sensitivity
to light and materials with embroidery’s symbolic precision, Dass’s works reflect on time, identity, and the repressed histories that continue to shape the present.

Dass’s art offers new ways of seeing and knowing, using her materials to transgress borders and reconfigure traditional notions of subjectivity and belonging.