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The age of exploration was one in which a confident and wealthy Europe was ready to look at the world in different ways. By this time, the emerging European imagination could see the ‘world’ as an imagined or designative concept. Textiles brought the colours of the ‘other’ lands, and its mass printing and production brought a sense of fantasy and playfulness into European homes.
Continuing Traditions follows the reflections on inter-relationships between textiles, trade and non-performing visual arts in India. The volume has been brought out in conjunction with an exhibition in India called ‘Safar-nama: Journeys through a Kalamkari Hanging’, an exhibition of digital prints of an ancient painted fabric piece in the kalamkari tradition of the Coromandel Coast which is now housed at the Museum of Printed Textiles of Mulhouse in France, along with ‘Continuing Traditions’, a show of contemporary artists and designers whose works can relate to it.
Continuing Traditions showcases the works of contemporary Indian artists who have used selective aspects of textile craft or textile imagery as inputs in their practice. After a long modernist interregnum in which the sole objective was to create a thing-initself, these works emerge as a postmodernist re-assertion of interrelationship between worldly phenomenon.
Published in association with Akar Prakar.
Pranabranjan Ray has worked as a social scientist for the Government of West Bengal. He has been a founder member and the secretary of the Society of Contemporary Artist, Calcutta, for 25 years. Ray has curated number of exhibitions and is the author of several books.
Surajit Sarkar was at one time a photocopier, salesman, a bank officer, a primary school teacher and a developer of curriculum for primary schools. He has created television programmes as well as documentary and educational films. Since 2001 he has worked as a video artist for theatre and dance productions, and as a multimedia installation artist.
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