Logo Goethe-Institut

Max Mueller Bhavan | India Chennai

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6:30 PM

Travelling Patterns - Book Launch

Book Launch |in cooperation with Tara Books

  • Tara Books , Chennai,Tamil Nadu

TPBL 2024 @Goethe-Institut Chennai

Travelling Patterns - 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.

The four artists who have created this book have come to their subject from different perspectives:

Aditi Jain (Chennai), who works with handloom weavers in Tamil Nadu, takes the viewer through the process of Indian spinning and weaving, using traditional block-printing icons.

Ruchi Shah (Mumbai and Bengaluru), illustrator and designer, builds a narrative around nature and the city, drawing on two kinds of traditional forms: geometric and organic.

Verena Gerlach (Berlin), graphic designer with a focus on type and font, creates her own motifs using objects and typography, assembling them together to evoke everyday life in a south Indian coastal city.

Henning Wagenbreth (Berlin), artist and musician, illustrates an ironic narrative of travel for our times, setting the images within elaborately patterned borders.

Travelling Patterns is also a celebration of print-making in various forms: the book has been letter-pressed on handmade paper. The cloth cover— hand printed using wooden blocks—pays homage to the traditional blocks from which the artists drew their inspiration.