Dolla Shikder’s practice explores ideas of memory and migration, tracing a sense of home across distances and losses. Her own experience of displacement shaped an inquiry into identity and belonging.
She works across textile, painting, print, photography and installation, drawing on oral histories, archival objects, personal memories, and the flora and fauna of the landscapes she has known. The women in her family run through the work as a presence, their silenced narratives, their ways of holding and passing on, their relationship to home as something fragile and constantly renegotiated.
Dolla returns home after long stretches away and finds the landscape altered each time. This ecological loss extends into her thinking about identity, about what culture means when it exists primarily in memory. Her material surfaces hold this suspension, images that move between what was seen and what is imagined, motifs carrying meanin as she remembers it. Alongside these, she brings objects and embroideries from home into the exhibition space, so that what is displayed is also what she carries and lives with.