Valay Gada
Valay Gada
Valay Gada
Valay Gada
Valay Gada
Valay GadaValay Gada
Valay Gada from New Delhi is an Artist in Residence at the Sitterwerk Foundation from August to November 2025. His stay is organised in collaboration with ProHelvetia.
“The current works explore my grief at losing my father to dementia and are inspired both in use of material and subject by visiting the Living Museum in Wil, the Vitro Musée (Romont) and the Musée de l’Art Brut (Lausanne) but most importantly engaging with conversations with caregivers and relatives who have lost loved ones to Dementia.
The small explorations on corroding mirrors play with the idea of selfhood and the loss of identity through dementia, where often you lose loved ones twice, first as they fail to recognize you and then through death. The germ of the idea was born in India as a coping mechanism for my personal loss of my dad to Alzheimer’s; where I equated the erosion of mirroring in old glass with the synapses in the brain failing to fire and leaving dark holes of memory loss, so you don’t recognize the image staring back at you as yourself. My Residency at Stiftung Sitterwerk has allowed me to explore deeply emotive works that explore love, loss and the letting go, as memory heals and fades for all of us. The current opportunity has allowed me to experiment with incorporating glass fusing, enameling and engraving techniques and enhance my technical skills in a relatively new material, for me.
Like a leaking tap the water drips slowly, the boulder of rock loses its angularity with every chip being eroded. Even glass is an amorphous solid, a supercooled liquid that like the cognitive self-melts down to a deliquescent dehumanized cadaver, and the river flows on in a million droplets.”
Open studio together with kyle malanda on Monday, October 27, 2025
5–8.30 pm: Open studios at the Atelierhaus with drinks and soup
6.30 pm: Presentation by kyle malanda
7.30 pm: Presentation by Valay Gada