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'Wearable installations' and stolen Van Goghs

A piece from the Monad collection. Photo: Swati KalsiPremium
A piece from the Monad collection. Photo: Swati Kalsi

Wearable installations

Swati Kalsi inspires you to pick the threads. The 2002 graduate of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) works with artisans from Bihar involved in making delicate Sujani embroidery. Her pieces are stocked at a high-end designer store in London. She showcases them on fashion ramps and exhibitions, one is part of the collection at Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and she sells by appointment. Are her pieces art, design, wearable installations, or craft? If her jackets cost a couple of lakh rupees, would that influence our answer? Kalsi’s new collection Monad will be on display today at the Mumbai gallery ARTISANS’, whose programming typically focuses on exhibitions of traditional non-metropolitan art forms. The range comprises pants, tunics, dresses and unique jackets in hand-woven ghicha silk and cotton and Tussar silk, with abstract patterns designed by Kalsi and embroidered by Sujani artisans.

Sujani, practised by women in Bihar, typically refers to a quilt made with used clothes like old saris and dhotis stitched together. It also incorporates motifs that narrate a story. In recent times, the craft has seen a revival of sorts. Archana Kumari, also a NIFT graduate and born to a family of Sujani craftspersons, sells Sujani-embroidered saris through her label Aunam.

The Jiyo initiative of Rajeev Sethi’s Asian Heritage Foundation, which aims to make creative grass-root ventures sustainable, also focuses on this craft, among others—Kalsi was associated with Jiyo and worked with Sujani artisans during her time there. In her collections, Kalsi simultaneously deconstructs the craft and transposes it in newer, wearable forms—one of her earlier collections was titled Bharua, which is the word for the filler stitch in Sujani embroidery. All the pieces were made using that stitch across the fabric in abstract patterns.

Kalsi’s work also brings to the forefront work that has traditionally been seen as domestic, and was considered low-brow, as opposed to high art. The high price points of these collections purport to address this inequality, and allow for sustainability of livelihoods of the artisans.

But at another level, they beg the question of affordability and audience. Perhaps these need not be mutually exclusive categories for such works to exist on the crossroads of art, craft and design.

The Monad collection, ranging in price from Rs10,000 to Rs3.5 lakh, will be on display today, 11am-7pm, at ARTISANS’, 52-56, Dr VB Gandhi Marg, Rhythm House Lane, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai.

Dhamini Ratnam

Congregation Leaving The Reformed Church In Nuenen’. Photo: AFP/Van Gogh Museum
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Congregation Leaving The Reformed Church In Nuenen’. Photo: AFP/Van Gogh Museum

Stolen Van Goghs recovered

In a real-life plot that Steven Soderbergh only wished he had written for film, two paintings by Vincent Van Gogh that were stolen more than a decade ago have been recovered by the Italian police. The paintings were found after a raid on a house in the small coastal town of Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples, during an investigation into drug trafficking by Camorra, a powerful Italian crime syndicate.

The two paintings were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam after thieves broke into the building from a window on the roof.

One of the works, View Of The Sea At Scheveningen, painted in 1882, is an early Van Gogh, and the other, Congregation Leaving The Reformed Church In Nuenen was made for his mother in 1884. It shows the church where his father Theodorus was a preacher, and where Van Gogh himself could have headed had he chosen the ecclesiastical life.

Rudraneil Sengupta

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Published: 07 Oct 2016, 05:01 PM IST
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