Jovita Alvares’ solo show ‘Goa last night I dreamed I touched you... today it dissipates’ — curated by Hajra Haider Karrar at Canvas Gallery in Karachi — was a deeply personal and politically charged exhibition. It interrogated the afterlives of colonial histories, their erasures, and the spectral traces they leave behind in individual and collective memory.

At the heart of Alvares’ practice lies a relentless excavation of counter-histories — marginalised narratives that have been lost or forcibly silenced under the weight of imperial legacies. She employs a multidisciplinary approach that spans installation, text, textile, and audio-visual and photo-based media, positioning art as a liminal space where these buried voices can emerge and insist on being heard.

Her current research probes the long shadow cast by Portuguese colonisation in Goa (1510–1961) and the Partition of India, mapping the ways in which these ruptures led to exclusions from the dominant historical record. The result is an inquiry into the nature of home, belonging and identity — that of her own family (her maternal grandmother to be specific) — and for those whose histories were never deemed worthy of archival preservation.

The exhibition unfolded through an evocative interplay of materials and forms. Cyanotypes on canvas and chiffon conjured ephemeral impressions, layered like palimpsests of memory. A site-specific wall carving, intricate and delicate, evoked lace ornaments traditionally used in domestic spaces, transforming the gallery into an uncanny threshold between personal and collective histories. 3D-printed family photographs glowed within light-boxes perched on ornate iron shelves, bridging the tangible with the spectral.

Jovita Alvares’s artworks excavate and trace the spectral presence of Portuguese colonial rule in Goa and its entangled legacy within Karachi’s Goan community

A salt print, layered across four sheets of chiffon, seemed to dissolve and reassemble with every shift in perspective. Audio-visual elements lent further depth, as voices and sounds wove through the space, articulating stories of separation, longing and connection across the borders that divide India and Pakistan.

Karachi’s Goan community, a small yet persistent presence for nearly two centuries, carries with it the layered inheritances of colonial displacement. Portuguese surnames such as Rodrigues, Fernandes, Albuquerque, Nazareth and Alvares stand as silent markers of this entangled past. Alvares’ work taps into this history, but it resists easy nostalgia. Instead, it acknowledges the fractures, the missing pieces, the spectres that linger.

For Alvares, history is not a fixed entity but a shifting, unstable terrain. When she turned to her family’s past, she found only fragments — a handful of photographs and oral narratives that changed with each retelling — vast gaps that could never be bridged. It is in these voids, these absences, that her work finds its unsettling potency. Rather than attempting to reconstruct a coherent, linear history, she embraces the unknowable, allowing ghosts of the past to surface as silent witnesses to colonial violence. Her intention is not absolution, but discomfort — a haunting that refuses to fade.

Surreal and deeply affecting, ‘Goa last night I dreamed I touched you... today it dissipates’ was not merely an exhibition but an act of remembrance, a reckoning with histories that refuse to be erased. Through material and memory, Alvares carved out a space where the past remains present, persistent, unresolved and insistently alive.

‘Goa last night I dreamed I touched you... today it dissipates’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from March 4-13, 2025

Rumana Husain is a writer, artist and educator. She is the author of two coffee-table books on Karachi, and has authored and illustrated 75 children’s books

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 30th, 2025