A new art exhibition that highlights the cultural cross-pollination between India and Great Britain in the field of textile design goes on show at the Royal Geographical Society May 7th to 21st. The exhibition explores this meshing of cultures and the way it is shaping our urban environment and the territory that people call their own, whether a house, a street or a shop.
Organised by Dr Helen Scalway, a visual artist based in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, the exhibition entitled ‘Moving Patterns’, is a drawing installation that works to provoke thought about the mixing of Indian and British design and its impact on British identity.
The exhibition bears witness to the way in which pattern and ornament are laden with meaning and memory in both colonial and post-colonial times. With a focus on ornament, Dr Scalway explores the processes of material cultural exchange between Britain and South Asia in a visual re-imagining of the relations between place, identity and national cultures, featuring guest artists Nilesh Mistry, Samar Abbas, and Sumi Perera, among others.
Images from the show include collages of photographs of the Green Street E7 area of London with textiles from the local Asian textile shops in the area. The resulting art-works evoke the mosaic of patterns which form part of twenty-first century 'Britishness' and our complex identity.
An artist primarily concerned with research into the visual representation of the experience of the contemporary cosmopolitan city, Dr Scalway says, ’Ornament surrounds us in the city, coding places and things, filling them with meaning, suffusing them with memory. Between Britain and South Asia, textile patterns in particular have shuttled back and forth; this exhibition explores this entanglement of cultures and the way it is shaping our urban environment’.
Dr Scalway’s work is part of a large, long term collaborative ‘Fashioning Diaspora Space’ project with the V & A Museum, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through its Diasporas, Migration and Identities strategic research programme. The exhibition will coincide with a major ‘Fashioning Diasporas’ conference to be held in the Sackler Centre at the V & A Museum from 15 – 16 May.
Dr Scalway’s blog can be viewed at
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1750_scalway/blog/
For more information please contact:
Helen Scalway, Artist,
Tel: 01372 811 840
Jake Gilmore, AHRC Communications Manager
Tel: 0797 099 4586
Editors Notes
Arts & Humanities Research Council: Each year the AHRC provides approximately £102 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes approximately 700 research awards and around 1,350 postgraduate awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. Arts and humanities researchers constitute over a quarter of all research-active staff in the higher education sector. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.
Diasporas, Migration and Identities is a five years £5.5 million trans- disciplinary research programme funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It includes arts and humanities scholars from all over the UK working on individual research, large collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, and in international networks. The aim is to research, discuss and present issues related to diasporas and migration, and their past and present impact on subjectivity and identity, culture and the imagination, place and space, emotion, politics and sociality.
http://www.diasporas.ac.uk/
For further information about the ‘Fashioning Diasporas’ conference, visit:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/courses/conferences/index.html#fashion