Exhibition Fractures to showcase India’s rainbow diversity of handcrafted textiles

The Devi Art Foundation’s upcoming exhibition ‘FRACTURES’: Indian Textiles, New Conversations will be an attempt to showcase India’s rainbow diversity of handcrafted textiles. In an age when much of textile design has become mechanized, it will look to prove that weaves done by hand have a personality, an intimacy and a soul that machines will never be able to replicate.

The exhibition will be on view from 22 January 2015 the gallery’s first show of the new year, and it presents a range of designers expressing themselves through textiles, drawing from the rich handloom tradition that makes up the warp and weft of India’s history.

The contemporary textiles here have been collected and commissioned over 14 years by the mother-and-son duo of Lekha and Anupam Poddar, founders of India’s first space dedicated to contemporary art.

These textiles have been designed using traditional techniques, an exercise that is unique in respect that it hasn’t been attempted in many decades. And to demonstrate that it is easier for a new generation, cushioned by a lush legacy, to be inspired by fabrics knitted by hand than those ‘manufactured’ by robots (and, besides, working with machines hardly challenges the designer).

For the show’s three curators – Mayank Mansingh Kaul, Rahul Jain and Sanjay Garg – FRACTURE acts as a conclusion to a discussion each has had with the artisans: featured here are the imaginative endeavours, individual as well as collaborative, of more than 30 artisans.

The works that make up FRACTURE are concepts of crafts persons, textile and fashion designers, visual artists, graphic designers – and also a filmmaker. Some of these inventive individuals have, in fact, worked with textiles for the first time. And many of them come from – and work in – an urban milieu, operating mainly in a studio environment. The challenge, then, was in the creation.

FRACTURE opens on January 21 with a preview, and will continue daily (expect Mondays), from 11am to 7pm, until November 2015.

The Devi Art Foundation has been established to facilitate the viewership of creative expression and artistic practice that exist in India.