Against the backdrop of last summer’s civil unrest, Where Were You Last Summer? is a a powerful new summer Exhibition at Arts Centre Washington that brings into focus the experiences of South Asian women.
The show, which opened on 17 July at Arts Centre Washington, features new work by artists Sehr Jalil, who is a contemporary visual artist, researcher, writer, and educationist. Jalil is from Lahore, Pakistan and is currently based in London and pursuing her PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London since September 2021 - and Padma Rao, who is a contemporary visual artist practicing painting and contemporary drawing, a visiting lecturer, arts facilitator and a published poet. The exhibition is exploring post-colonial identity, collective memory, and the quiet force of everyday resistance.
.jpg)
Curated by Delhi-born curator Manmeet K. Walia, the exhibition is the result of a cross-border collaboration that bridges personal narratives with broader socio-political tensions. It responds directly to the violence and trauma of the 2024 raceriots, using personal testimony, archive, and abstraction to examine the intimate impact of conflict on South Asian women in the UK and beyond.
Artist Padma Rao, based in Sunderland, draws from stories gathered in collaboration with Bangladeshi communities on Wearside and South Tyneside, and through partnerships with local women’s arts and health organisation Sangini. “There are daily acts of activism that aren’t always visible,” she says. “The stories of these women-fleeing abuse, coping in silence, hold strength and defiance. I wanted my work to honour that resilience.”
Her pieces, developed through mark-making, collage, and text, give shape to this tension between memory and erasure. One work, Fences, captures the emotional and political divides felt during the riots, where lines were drawn both literally and metaphorically.
Sehr Jalil, a painter from Lahore, Pakistan and a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, brings a more international lens to the show. Her work investigates family archives, abstraction, gender and the politics of memory. Jalil blurs the space between reality and recollection. Through layering and assemblage, she explores how memory fragments can come together to tell fuller, more intimate histories. She says, “For me, it is a more intimate inquiry, as understanding oneself can only help in understanding each other. My pieces in this exhibition include paintings that I see as ‘a memory of a memory’, and auto-fictive story-telling (writing) with visuals/painting, most of this is directly connected to a serendipitous, fleeting but important link between Sunderland and my grandfather who’s WW2 archive has been the entry point and core of my PhD inquiry.”
.jpg)
Together, their practices form a dialogue, sometimes quiet, sometimes sharp, about identity, protest, and presence. Despite coming from across borders, both artists embrace the shared histories and tensions of the region and its diasporas, offering anuanced perspective on belonging and voice.
Where Were You Last Summer? is on view at Arts Centre Washington until 30 August’25.
