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.
- Category: All Books, Contemporary Art, MAPIN20
Continuing Traditions follows the reflections on inter-relationships between textiles, trade and non-performing visual arts in 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 that 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 of contemporary artists and designers whose works can relate to it.
Continuing Traditions showcases the works of contemporary Indian artists who have used selective aspects of textile 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.
Pranabranjan Ray, the exhibition advisor, graduated from Visva Bharati, Santiniketan and got his Masters degree from Calcutta University, in social sciences. He has worked as a social scientist for the Government of West Bengal. He has been a founder member and the secretary of the Society of Contemporary Artist, Calcutta, for 25 years.
He had served as the guest lecturer at the Faculty of fine Arts, M.5. University of Baroda, Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan and as visiting Professor, Faculty of Visual Arts, Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta. He was a commissioner for the Indian Section of the 1978 Delhi International Triennale and had also been a member of the Editorial Board of Lalit Kala Contemporary. Ray had been a member of the Advisory Committee of the Roopankar Museum, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal as well as an art critic with many Indian publications.
Pranabranjan Ray has written over a hundred research papers for seminars, conferences and lectures which got published in prestigious journals and anthologies, on the visual arts, artists, cinema and social sciences. He has also authored several books and curated a number of exhibitions. He has conceptualised, done research, written scripts and commentary for a number of documentary films on visual arts and artists. He has worked extensively on works of artists like Rabindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, Ramkinkar Baij, Somnath Hore, Ganesh Pyne and Bikash Bhattacharjee et.al.
• Santosh Kumar Gangwar, Minister of State for Textiles
• Foreword By Akar Prakar
• Curatorial Note: Esclarmonde Monteil, Curator and Director of Museum
• Surajit Sarkar: World Within Worlds
• Pranabranjan Ray: Intertwining Inheritance and Practice
• Artists:
• Aditya Basak
• Anju Dodiya
• Archana Hande
• G.R. lranna
• Jayashree Chakravarty
• Paula Sengupta
• Shrabani Roy
• Surajit Sarkar
• Sabyasachi Mukherjee (Designer/Styliste)
• Credits: Acknowledgements
• The Museum: About Musee de la Toile de Jouy
• About Akar Prakar
| Pages | 88 |
| Number of illustrations | 61 |
| Size | 8.5 x 12” (216 x 305 mm), softcover with gatefold |
| Date of Publishing | 2015 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Rights Available | World rights |