“We do not make the beads because they are pretty, but because they are difficult.” (Alia, in conversation towards I will meet you in a mere second, 2025.)

For her own re-membering, Alia attempts to recollect her family's past in relation to the residues of grief, death, and labour. Within the quietness of making, she disguises these memories. Distortion becomes a form of protection. The beads, now, extend safekeeping in a shared engagement.

Initially, Alia made paper beads as a way of connecting with her late grandfather and paying tribute to his seven sisters, who were bead makers. She emulated their tradition as a communal process, as to grapple with her lost Indian heritage. I will meet you in a mere second invites collaboration beyond her family, asking guests to join her in a ritualistic process of bead making. The beads facilitate the participation of memory collection, encouraging quiet intimacy and connection. They become receptacles and markers for thoughts and stories that can be written, spoken or acknowledged by participants in the process. 

Alia’s grandmother's Quran stand, ink with ground charcoal, rose water, and henna dyed cotton – these sacred materials and heirlooms are coordinates within the space, and steer the participant within the ritual. “My mother recalls a scrambling, but can’t remember what”, Alia says of the seven sisters collecting scraps and accessible materials to make the beads. I will meet you in a mere second makes use of found paper to acknowledge their process. 

Once the bead is rolled, it is layered and encased in barley flour and honey, the two ingredients used to make Talbina. The paper bead is not to be seen again. Talbina is a porridge that Alia’s grandmother said can “soften a heart of grief”. Not to move away from grief, but to rather sit and exist within memory. The beads are precious, they are reapers and carriers, confiding in all things not spoken aloud, their potency whispered at, protected within.

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Goods is a project space for work in process and thinking aloud. The location’s transitory nature as a thoroughfare encourages a light-footed navigation of curatorial and artistic practice and rapid prototyping of ideas.