
Meera Sethi
The Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities, University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).
SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and the Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities (CSACH) are pleased to welcome Meera Sethi as the winter 2020 artist-in-residence at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). Over the next three months, Meera will develop a body of research through site-responsive and site-specific artistic investigations, culminating in a non-permanent installation on campus.
Meera Sethi is a visual artist with a interdisciplinary, 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 textile is constituted over vast geographies.
Through her work, she delves deep into the ways we understand and appreciate the self, the body, cloth and clothing including it’s histories, resonances, and possibilities.
The residency will invite art into the academic spaces of the university and give students and faculty a place to think about the role of contemporary art in public conversations. CSACH brings together the University of Toronto’s outstanding tri-campus South Asia faculty and graduate students for workshops and research activities. With the diverse student body of UTM and the larger Mississauga area, the program will help to develop an appreciation of contemporary art as practiced by racialized artists in the wider community while contributing significantly to UTM’s cultural landscape.
As the artist develops their creative work at UTM, discussion of their practice will be integrated into courses in History, History of Religions, Women and Gender Studies, Visual Culture and Communication, Art History, Art Studio, and/or Cinema Studies. Interested classes will invite the selected artist to come and speak about their work and engage the class in participatory/experiential activities related to artmaking as a response to political and social transformations in contemporary South Asia and the South Asian diaspora
Unskilled is a three-part research- and process-based exploration of the life cycle of clothing from seed to closet including the many sites of skill and care that evade or constitute it. Unskilled renders the work of care as a slowed down participatory process that confronts and confounds fast fashion.
Using mainstream media photographs found online that accompany articles about garment worker protests in South Asia, I take a micro view of patterns found on the clothing of garment workers during protest actions for fair wages and safe factories and expand on these in detailed mixed media drawings. I render these in accurate detail, thereby showing a level of care rarely afforded to those whose skilled labour is routinely exploited. As viewers of this work, we are asked to look anew at garment worker actions beyond the numbing impact of mass media images.
Source images and process videos can be found here.

Industrial Accident, 2020, pencil on paper, 15 in. x 12.5 in.

Sollen Haften, 2020, ink on paper, 15 in. x 12.5 in.

Media Won’t, 2020, pencil on paper, 15 in. x 12.5 in.
This residency is in partnership with Jackman Humanities Institute and Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities at University of Toronto (CSACH) .
The Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities was established in 2013. CSACH brings together the University of Toronto’s outstanding tricampus South Asia faculty and graduate students for workshops and research activities. CSACH is based at the UTM campus, which is world-renowned for its depth of faculty expertise in this area but enjoys tricampus membership and hosts events across all U of T campuses. The Centre has grown dramatically since its inception and regularly hosts events ranging from public lectures, workshops and cultural performances to graduate summer schools.
