A highly experimental project, the gallery space was filled with vinyll text in an attempt at bringing the two different experiences together. Below is a quote:
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Past-Present: Craft Communities of Modern and Contemporary India is an experimental project that shares Ramaswamy’s concern and attempts at partially bridging the epistemological silences represented by traditionalist discourses by engaging with the weavers’ narratives and their stupefying socioeconomic contexts. The exhibition seeks to generate numerous points of departure into the study of the artistic processes involved in the production of textiles, but also present a study of the livelihoods that are sustained and created as a result. As such in attempting to make sense of contemporary textile making in India, this exhibition adapts a mode of thinking (which one scholar has provocatively claimed as the ‘re-membering of the past in the present’) by juxtaposing the field content of two study trips undertaken to India from Singapore in 1964 and 2008 respectively.
The first ‘remembering’ is of the reputed art historian and then Director of the Museum William Willets whose Indian tour of textile making began from the Southern Indian city of Madras and ended in what is today the state of Rajasthan after a brief sojourn in Orissa. Upon his return Willets curated an exhibition titled ‘Indian Textiles’. Apart from the few textiles which were secured by donations and loans, most were collected by Willets in the course of his tour. The journalistic details of the trip remain sketchy due to the lack of verifiable sources except for the catalogue which was authored by Willets and published in conjunction with the exhibition – a document which I will return to later.
The second event is of a 2008 study trip undertaken by NUS University Scholars Programme students titled ‘Urban Northern India: Communities, Livelihoods, Habitats’ which sought to study crafts and craft communities in Northern India to understand social issues, livelihoods, NGO activities and the difficulties in preserving ‘heritage’. The trip examined the late-modern sociocultural structures of craft communities, and as Dr Medha Kudaisya intended, the continuing relevance of caste in terms of occupation in contemporary India and the problems crafts communities face such as the lack of capital, dependency on moneylenders and lack of information and access to urban markets. The field trip involved working with both governmental and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). At one level the students sought to understand the critical role organizations such as the Craft Revival Trust, Central Cottage Industries of India, Delhi Haat and the Anokhi Museum of Hand-printing perform, but also extended this understanding further by directly interacting with the craft communities. Much of the contemporary materials on display were collected as part of the field trip which covered craftspersons and organizations operating in urban Rajasthan and Delhi.
Curatorially, the project has been challenging, juxtapositions of the contested pasts against contemporary modes of production and reception is never a neutral and unambiguous process. In the midst of forging the reparative continuity between cultural identity and the historical past, this project has had to contend with two major caveats. The museum space itself which accentuates some of the inherent difficulties in reconciling the ever shifting terrain between Museums and their source communities but more discerningly, the challenge of pushing beyond the discipline of ‘art history’ and into a multidisciplinary method in appreciating art and material cultures. Therefore, the postulation of the two above ‘events’ is crucial for the illustration of the unsustainable discrepancy between the finitude of the thinking rational body of literature and the infinite variety of the world—which always remains in excess of what the modern episteme can or does represent. Therefore, the title of the exhibition – ‘Past-Present’ – suggests that to attempt telling or revealing the histories of others is to be pressed against the margins of one’s own.
For more details:
Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Past-Present:Craft Communities in Contemporary India, Singapore: NUS Museum, 2009.
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