Anshu Singh works with textiles as carriers of memory, labour, and lived exchange. Trained in weaving and textile design at Banaras Hindu University, her practice emerges from the wider Benaras region, including Mirzapur and Bhadohi, where carpet-weaving traditions shaped by Kashmiri and Persian lineages continue to circulate through hands rather than archives.

Benaras, a city sustained by design rather than raw material, is known for its zari embroidery and brocade. Weaving here is also entwined with the legacy of Kabir—the anti-caste poet whose verses moved between Hindu and Islamic thought, and whose words remain embedded in everyday artisan life.

Singh works at the intersection of contemporary artistic practice and community-based embroidery and weaving in villages around Benaras. Her relationship to textile labour began early, through her mother’s boutique, a space of informal exchange where weavers gathered, talked, and worked. Language enters her practice quietly—through single-word poems such as Life Jacket or Repair, and through fragments of Kabir’s poetry, including the line, “No more I weave a garment of pain!”

During the Covid lockdown, she embroidered Life Jacket onto jute backpacks worn by workers in a wholesale vegetable market near her home—an environment marked by risk and precarity. The gesture was intimate and direct; these were the same workers connected to her family’s vegetable fields and daily routines.

Her materials are modest and often salvaged: rope, jute sacks, used sari thread, factory cloth waste, wire, and polymer textiles repurposed from cement bags. Through these, Singh attends to repair, survival, and the quiet intelligence of hands—allowing textiles to speak of care, endurance, and shared ground.