Cupped Hands Hold Water

Cupped Hands Hold Water

Artists and Nimra Bandukwala and Hashveenah Manoharan independently utilize their art practices for ecological storytelling, recounting memories of homelands past through pigments and sculptures. In Cupped Hands Hold Water, their works converse and converge, highlighting the material variance in how they feel compelled to tell these stories. Here, their levels of cultural retention manifests in the nature of their work, as a dance between the ephemeral and the archival.

Bandukwala’s sculptures tend to be impermanent, knowing that these stories will be sustained through her intact cultural communities and language fluency. Bandukwala’s work heavily features natural materials, designed and intended to fall apart with time, deteriorating comfortably with the assurance that these stories will be passed down through language and craft. These pieces even drift beyond the wall into the tactile, the functional, and the interactive, open to a fate of wear and tear.

Meanwhile, Manoharan’s instincts are to preserve her memories in ink, a response to conflict-induced migration at a young age, leaving a wide gulf between her current life in Canada and the language and ecologies of home. Her work emulates the traditional scientific illustration form, with an allegiance to accuracy. Under the threat of transience, Manoharan’s pieces aim to archive fleeting memories. 

Cupped Hands Hold Water shines a light on how story retention is shaped by one’s migration context. Do you hold on to your stories desperately, in fear that they will be lost, slipping through your fingers? Or do you drink deeply and loosely from your cupped hands, knowing your well of water and knowledge is full and renewable?

This body of work was exhibited as part of duo exhibition at Studio 27, in downtown Kitchener from November-December 2025.