The installation; This Much I Have Left (2025) part of the group exhibition Water Never Sleeps at @slaturhusid in the eastern Icelandic town Egilsstaðir.
Curated by Savannah Gorton
Participating artists:
Silvia Bächli, Margrét H. Blöndal, Gitte Broeng og Lasse Krog Møller, Nanna Debois Buhl, Dev Dhunsi, Eygló Harðardóttir, Ráðhildur Ingadóttir, Karin Sander og Jasper Sebastian Stürup.
Dev Dhunsi
This much I have left, 2025
Sublimation-printed textile, thread, wood
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Dev Dhunsi’s installation, This much I have left, 2025, combines imagery recalling a childhood
game played with his sister with aspects of his family history. In the game, stones cupped in
palms are repeatedly flipped up in the air, though some are lost each time while catching them.
This gesture of slippage serves as a metaphor for what is kept versus forgotten within the fluid
realm of identity and memory. Circular vignettes of his sister’s hands float upon a “sea” wherein
each of the island tableaus gradually diminish as fewer stones remain. Fragments from a
painting by Dhunsi’s father, an artist, and a carpet woven by his grandmother, a traditional
artisan, are immersed in water. The carpet was brought from India to Norway by his father, a
souvenir of the family’s artmaking spanning generations. These intertwined layers – conceptual,
visual, and narrative – merge together, while suffused with meaning. Remnants stirring rhythms
of thought, migration, and the uncertainty of inheritance. Memories, that like water, are filtered,
floating, difficult to hold.