Continuing Traditions

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 immigration could see the ‘world’ as an imagined or designated 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. This book follows the reflections on inter-relationships between textiles, trade and non-performing visual arts of India. The volume has been brought out in conjunction with a travelling 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, which prevailed in the Coromandel Coast, and is now housed at the Museum of Printed Textiles of Mulhouse in France, along with Continuing Traditions , a show contemporary artists and designers whose works can relate to it. The book showcases the works of contemporary India artists who have used selective aspects of textiles craft or textile imagery as inputs in their practice. After a long modernist interregnum in which the sole objective was to create a thing-in-itself, these works emerge as a postmodernist re-assertion of interrelationship between worldly phenomenon.