Kritika Manchanda & Rafael Prieto

Galerie Sardine is pleased to present There, When, an exhibition bringing together the collaborative and individual practices of Kritika Manchanda and Rafael Prieto. United by a sustained attention to the fragile ways experience is recorded, retained, and transformed, the artists work primarily with fabric, most often cotton, to create soft sculptural forms that occupy a space between object and memory, presence and disappearance. Rather than monumentalizing experience, these works attend to its fleeting traces, giving material form to gestures, memories, and impressions that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

Throughout the exhibition, fabric functions as both medium and metaphor. Cotton occupies a particular place: a material at once humble and deeply charged, soft and mutable yet inseparable from histories of labor, exchange, migration, and touch. Intimately bound to human life, it carries within its fibers stories that are both personal and collective. In Manchanda's practice, cotton arrives already layered with history. Drawing upon the complex cultural legacy of cloth in India, where cotton was both a site of colonial extraction and a potent symbol within movements for self-determination, her works suggest how political and cultural memory can remain embedded within material itself. Prieto, by contrast, turns his attention toward the poetic residues of everyday life: laundry suspended between buildings, weathered surfaces, temporary arrangements, and subtle gestures that evoke human presence long after the figure has departed. Together, their works reveal how the most ephemeral aspects of existence often leave the deepest impressions.

The exhibition takes its title from a phrase suspended between recollection and anticipation. There, When evokes a temporal slippage in which past and present momentarily converge. It suggests memory not as a fixed repository of facts, but as an active process of reconstruction, where fragments, sensations, and impressions continually shift in relation to the present. The title remains deliberately open, holding together what has been experienced and what remains unresolved.

Underlying the exhibition is an understanding of time not simply as a measure of duration, but as a collector of presence. Time gathers traces. It softens edges, obscures details, and yet somehow intensifies what remains. A garment retains the memory of a body; a fold recalls the gesture that formed it; an empty space becomes charged by the life that once animated it. Through forms that appear delicate, provisional, and often weightless, Manchanda and Prieto suggest that absence is never truly empty, but filled with the quiet persistence of lived experience.

In these works, emptiness becomes a generative condition. What is missing proves as significant as what remains. Suspended between disappearance and remembrance, the sculptures invite viewers to slow down and attend to the subtle ways meaning emerges through suggestion rather than declaration. Occupying a threshold between material and imagination, they offer a meditation on impermanence, memory, and the surprising fullness that can reside within the ephemeral.