08/06/2026
Alka Dass will be at Witklipfontein for an amazing residency. We are excited to see her at work!
Alka Dass is a South African interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves between photography, textile, embroidery, printmaking, and archival processes. Working primarily with cyanotype, she often reworks family photographs and found imagery into textile pieces that explore memory, migration, ancestry, and the fragile nature of belonging.
Her practice is deeply invested in slow forms of making — stitching, beading, hand-printing, and dyeing become acts of preservation and quiet resistance against erasure. Through these processes, images shift between visibility and disappearance, reflecting on how histories are carried through objects, bodies, and inherited memory.
Her work often draws from personal and collective archives, particularly histories connected to the South African Indian diaspora, domestic space, and intergenerational storytelling. Textile becomes both material and metaphor: something worn, carried, repaired, and passed down.
She has exhibited locally and internationally, including at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, 1-54 Art Fair London, Untitled Miami, and the FNB Art Joburg. Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Iziko South African National Gallery.”
