For centuries, textiles and their embellishment have been considered a craft oriented practice. Embroidery, the world over, was attributed to the feminine domain until certain global movements of artists established its practice outside of domestic spaces as an expressive art form. In the Indian context, the significance of hand-crafting traditions is enormous, with each region exhibiting an indigenous lineage of technique and design. Viewed from the pre-colonial perspective, blurred boundaries exist in the sub-continent between high art and artisanal craft-making, as the processes and aesthetic tenets overlapped in essence. These mediums are finding fresh relevance in the trans-disciplinary space of contemporary art.
Entwined is a compilation of work by artists who have been exploring and contextualizing the legacies of stitching, embroidery and textile history. In choosing thread and fabric, the artists primarily showcase a love for the textural and tactile, underlying which a number of other concerns are manifest. Their approaches and subjects are eclectic – yet at a symbolic level they remain connected, their languages presenting an intersection of personal stories with larger historical and global narratives. The exhibition encompasses notions of the body and mind, individual and collective memory, identity and belonging, gender and nationhood, socio-cultural and geo-political commentary, as well as spirituality and philosophy. The works engender deep contemplation – the viewer is led through a plural world of yarns and fibres, knots and stitches, markings of paint and pigment, that assume the significance of a complex space that has the capacity to transcend time, connect the real with the imagined, and the private with the universal.