The outcomes of the project
An exhibition at DakshinaChitra on the topic of pattern, featuring the design / art works of the artists and placing it within the history of block-prints and Kalamkari collection of DakshinaChitra.
- Inauguration & Panel Discussion held on December 01, 2023 | 15.30
- Exhibition viewing from December 02, 2023 to January 21, 2024
- Book Launch - Travelling Patterns - February 10, 2024 | 6.30 pm
Tara Books & Goethe-Institut Chennai pays tribute to the enduring power and beauty of textile patterns. Inspired by motifs, icons and decorative elements that feature in Indian block-printed textiles, four artists—from India and Germany—set out to play with the language of patterns.
The book features each of their journeys through four distinct visual narratives, as they tease apart and reassemble patterns and motifs. It also captures the long history of pattern making in a rather unique way.
India's textile art comprises visual elements drawn from a range of cultures, from East Africa to Southeast Asia, and from West Asia to Europe. The art has thus been always open to influences, and has therefore travelled widely. We have added to this theme of travel in Travelling Patterns, pattern-making travels from textile to paper, from the decorative to the narrative, and across cultures
A collective Wall-Mural live project curated, conducted and executed by artist Ruchi Shah together with a selected group of fine arts students from Stella Maris College and Government College of Arts. A mural comprising of innovatively evolved patterns is adorn the staircase spaces of Goethe-Institut building.
The Artists and their Work
Aditi Jain stays with the grammar of weaving and block making and uses patterns to capture the process of weaving and printing - thereby showing how the process and outcome are intricately linked.
Ruchi Shah recontextualizes the usage of patterns and plays with the two main kinds of motifs, geometric and organic. She brings them together by transferring them to another context - the space of a city.
Verena and Henning, on the other hand, take their cues from how patterns are hybrid and constantly created and recreated - they move away from the textile context, yet they keep with the broader grammar of patterns as frames, creating meaning through repetition, arrangement and so on.
Verena Gerlach has built a visual dictionary of the sea and coastal life as she saw it in Chennai. She creates patterns out of objects and objects out of type.
Henning Wagenbreth has constructed a set of seemingly formal images, each of which is framed by twin pattern 'frames', within which is a figure, objects, an event...
There is a story of how all of them have travelled through patterns, staying with them, carrying them, taking inspiration from them, and making them part of how you tell a story.