DakshinaChitra Museum’s Looking Southwards Examines Craft and Contemporary Art in South India

DakshinaChitra Museum opens Looking Southwards: The DakshinaChitra Vision of Craft, Art, and Cultural Heritage connected January 9 astatine the Varija Gallery, offering a timely reflection connected however South India’s trade traditions and modern creator practices intersect, influence, and reshape 1 another.

Curated by Chennai-based creation historiographer Shruti Parthasarathy, the accumulation draws attraction to DakshinaChitra’s long-standing committedness to determination taste practice portion questioning the accepted disagreement betwixt “fine art” and accepted craft. Instead of treating these arsenic abstracted oregon hierarchical categories, Looking Southwards places them successful progressive dialogue, underscoring their shared societal histories and worldly concerns.

“At its core, the accumulation seeks to historicise DakshinaChitra Museum arsenic an institution, foregrounding its sustained committedness to the arts, crafts, and ocular traditions of South India since its founding successful 1996. Over astir 3 decades, DakshinaChitra has consciously built a important postulation spanning modern and modern art,” says Shruti.

At the bosom of the accumulation is DakshinaChitra’s modern and modern creation collection, developed with a conscious South Indian focus. Works by artists associated with the Madras Art Movement—key figures successful the region’s mid-20th-century modernism—appear alongside aboriginal Indian contemporaries and a prime radical of planetary artists. These are illustrated done conversations with surviving trade practices, including secular and ritual-votive traditions, revealing the scope and vitality of South India’s ocular culture. ”What is peculiarly compelling is DakshinaChitra’s sustained engagement with artists done its assorted creator camps and the outcomes that emerged from them. This semipermanent nurturing of creator signifier by an autarkic instauration is remarkable,” she points out.

The curator frames the accumulation done a textile metaphor: enduring trade traditions signifier the warp, portion modern and modern creation represent the weft. Together, they nutrient a azygous fabric—suggesting that taste individuality is not static, but continuously woven done continuity and change. Shruti goes connected to explicate that the accumulation brings unneurotic a wide spectrum of South India’s trade and creator traditions, presenting the enactment of accepted trade practitioners alongside artworks by artists ranging from the Madras Art Movement to modern practitioners from Tamil Nadu and the wider South Indian region. A cardinal item is simply a travelling shrine dating to early-mid 20th Century, from Telangana — a box-like operation richly adorned with vibrant accepted paintings and lodging an idol of a devi. Historically, specified shrines were carried by nomadic musicians arsenic they travelled betwixt towns and cities, serving arsenic mobile sites of devotion, performance, and storytelling.

The accumulation besides features Adivasi creation forms specified arsenic Gond and Warli, presented not arsenic static oregon archival traditions but arsenic surviving practices that proceed to evolve, responding to modern forms, ideas, and contexts

Looking Southwards highlights DakshinaChitra’s imaginativeness of dissolving the often rigid favoritism betwixt creation and accepted trade practices, treating them not arsenic abstracted categories but arsenic interconnected modes of originative expression. Within this framework, sculpting, painting, textile weaving, and indigenous trade practices are brought unneurotic nether a shared creator continuum. As an institution, DakshinaChitra has besides played a important relation successful the conservation and preservation of these divers creator traditions of South India, portion actively ensuring their relevance wrong modern taste discourse.

The accumulation promises to beryllium of peculiar involvement to students, researchers, and visitors keen to recognize however South India’s creator past and contiguous stay profoundly entwined.

@DakshinaChitra Museum, Muttukadu. Varija Gallery, 10 americium to 5 pm. Closed connected Tuesdays. The accumulation volition beryllium connected presumption from January 9 to February 15, and again from March 9 to March 30. Phone: 98410 20149