This spring, ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) invites visitors to experience a series of immersive textile installations created by contemporary artist Swapnaa Tamhane, on display until August 1, 2022. Swapnaa Tamhane: Mobile Palace is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and brings together layered fabric compositions that challenge traditional hierarchies between art and craft.
At the heart of the exhibition are three cotton cloth installations composed of heavily patterned blockprinted fabric. Tamhane aims to re-imagine notions of decoration and pattern in compositions that echo tent forms used in India. In this presentation, ROM invites visitors to move around, in, and through Tamhane’s sweeping canopies to explore ideas of gathering and experiences of spaces.
Tamhane draws on India’s rich textile traditions, approaching these techniques through a contemporary lens. Inspired by Mughal and Ottoman tents used as mobile palaces, and with motifs that reference the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier’s Ahmedabad Textile Mill Owners’ Association House (ATMA), the exhibition also features wooden printing blocks, works on handmade paper and a new film showcasing how the pieces were created. Tamhane worked in a collaborative creative process with artists based in Gujarat, India, including dyer and printer Salemamad Khatri, wood block carver Mukesh Prajapati, and the Qasab-Kutch Craftswomen embroidery collective. Tamhane designed motifs, appliqué and beading to create punctuated interruptions in the repetition of patterns, asking us to consider the spaces in-between.
Swapnaa Tamhane
