Love Tales by Savia Viegas

This exhibition presents hand-embroidered floss on repurposed denim, bringing forth stories of love, sex, and everyday life drawn from Goa’s oral archives. Savia’s work is layered and episodic. They explore the anxieties, desires, and choices of her characters through an interplay of text and image, combining her roles as storyteller, artist, and embroiderer.

The fleshed-out flash fiction narratives accompanying each piece present stories of love that never reach happy endings but instead linger within the liminal space of expectations and identity. There is something familiar about these tales. They feel like stories overheard through thin walls, repeated in hushed whispers, or carried across balcaos by the evening breeze. Intimate and collective like rumours freezing into memories that form the basis of folklore.

The genesis of this body of work is an unfinished quilt that Savia once planned to make jointly with her mother. Encountering it years later opened a floodgate of memories: of her mother, grandmothers, their stories, of love, and its ambiguity, all centring around the gendered craft. Cultural traditions and their contradictions have become her source of inspiration. 

Savia’s craft gathers fragments of love spoken too late, of promises folded away, of betrayal and penance. She holds them not too tightly, just enough to keep them from wandering away. 

Explore the Love Tales exhibition catalogue