There is something about weight—its intimacy, its burden, its quiet persistence—that resists easy representation. It slips through the language of metrics and measurements and instead coils itself around the stories we tell, the bodies we inhabit, and the rituals we repeat without questioning. In What Women Carry, a dual exhibition by Goan artists Harshada Kerkar and Chaitali Morajkar at the Museum of Goa (MOG) in Pilerne, weight becomes a metaphor, symbol, relic, and dream. It is an exhibition that asks us to look as well as feel—heavily, tenderly, and with a kind of slow recognition.
Harshada Kerkar and Chaitali Morajkar at the Museum of Goa (MOG)
Walking into the 2nd-floor gallery of MOG, the first thing one encounters is not an object, but a mood. The air carries a contemplative silence. Not the silence of emptiness, but the pause before memory speaks. The artworks—poised, detailed, almost breathing—seem to wait for the viewer to arrive, physically, and emotionally. They demand presence.
Harshada Kerkar’s pieces draw deeply from the landscapes of daily life, yet they elevate the mundane into a gesture of reverence. Her focus on the women in Goan markets is ethnographical; it is an intimate witnessing. The bodies she renders—some upright with grace, others stooped in motion—carry more than the physical baskets balanced on their heads. They carry histories, negotiations, and a kind of stoic poetry. In a few particularly striking pieces, the women stand at the cusp of motion, a large basket perched on their head filled with not vegetables but fragments of domesticity—plastic bottles, glass jars, a goat, and a pair of brooms. The basket becomes a museum of their own making, a personal archive of things they must hold together.
“When I think about the women I’ve met in my life, I see their quiet strength,” Kerkar says. “This exhibition is a way to acknowledge their resilience.” There is something gently radical in this act of acknowledgement. By inviting us to pause, she challenges the viewer to look again, to move past the invisibility that often cloaks the feminine labour of endurance.
Myth, Memory, and Desire
If Kerkar’s work is grounded in the poetics of the seen world, Chaitali Morajkar’s work is a leap into the symbolic. Her chosen medium—the kudnem, a traditional Goan pot—becomes the surface upon which myth, memory, and desire merge. Painted in dreamlike layers, each pot becomes a cosmos. Figures emerge in motion, away from the gravitational pull of cultural prescription. Women in her work are neither subjects of pity nor objects of spectacle—they are shape-shifters, conjurers of their own mythologies.
What does freedom look like?
“For me, art is about transformation,” Morajkar reflects. “I want my work to make people think—what does freedom look like? What happens when we let go of what weighs us down?” These questions are not rhetorical. They haunt the viewer long after leaving the gallery. One pot depicts a woman with screaming fish; another shows a rooster in royal robes standing with a mango in hand. There is rupture, yes—but also emergence.
Together, Kerkar and Morajkar weave a dialogue across mediums, textures, and emotional registers. What links their work is not the theme of “weight,” but a shared impulse to rethink how that weight is carried, inherited, resisted and metamorphosed. They do not romanticise struggle, but neither do they reduce it to victimhood. There is defiance here, but also grace—a kind of luminous patience that knows how to wait out storms.
In a society where the language of women’s lives is often flattened into binaries—strong or fragile, empowered or oppressed—What Women Carry refuses such simplicity. Instead, it offers nuance, ambiguity, and texture. One might say it offers truth, but truth here is not a fixed proposition. It is fluid, shaped by memory, altered by time, and refracted through perspective.
Sharada Kerkar’s Take on the Exhibition
Sharada Kerkar, director of the Museum of Goa, captures the exhibition’s resonance when she says, “This exhibition is about more than weight; it’s about legacy, resistance and change. It encourages reflection on what it means to be a woman today.” In a moment where cultural conversations around gender are often reactive, What Women Carry slows the tempo. It invites a kind of thinking that is felt before it is understood.
And there is something quietly political in that gesture. In refusing spectacle, the exhibition becomes subversive. In choosing tenderness over volume, it insists on a different mode of engagement—one that is personal, ethical, and even meditative.
By the time one leaves the exhibition, the concept of “weight” no longer belongs to the realm of the abstract. It lingers on the skin, in the heart. One begins to think of all the other invisible weights women carry—across borders, across lifetimes: the weight of expectation, of tradition, of silence, of beauty, of unpaid labour, of survival. But also the weight of dreams, of laughter, of stories passed down in kitchens and backyards, of rebellions both quiet and loud.
In this way, What Women Carry becomes more than an exhibition. It becomes a space of witnessing, of communion. It opens up room for the unsaid, the unspoken, and in doing so, allows something rare: the possibility of seeing again, differently.
The exhibition remains open until May 18, 2025, but its echoes are likely to last much longer. For those willing to sit with discomfort, to let art speak in a whisper rather than a shout, this is not a show to miss. It is not just about what women carry—but how, and why, and at what cost. And perhaps, most vitally, what they might yet choose to put down.
Image Courtesy of Museum of Goa
Nilankur believes in the magic of critical thinking, intelligent dialogue and creativity. He stays in Goa, programs for the Museum of Goa and is a columnist.
