Unfolding Pattern:

Saloni Shah and Tiantian Lou

Saloni Shah’s The Fabric that was Banned

Chintz - the Indian fabric popularised for its vivid colors is tinted with a distressing history of transformation and disassociation which is largely neglected. The popular fabric was widely exported from India throughout Europe, however, with the fear of losing profits and protests from locals in their own country, the British Raj banned Chintz and went on to imitate the process.
The Fabric that was Banned renders this transformation using the motif of a bird to narrate this story of entrapment. The work employs and builds on imagery of traditional Chintz contrasted with the English glazed replicas and modern iterations to showcase this timeline and the subsequent shift in power.

Tiantian Lou’s Soft Vessel

Soft Vessel is Tiantian’s most recent experiment probing the pliability and ephemeralness in everyday objects that are usually perceived as solid and long-lasting. Vessels are essential and ubiquitous — as intellectual and social objects, vessels reflect their chronology, culture, and ritual… Soft Vessel examines the art-historical category “vessel”; at the same time, reimagine the vessel as a pliable, modern object. The experiment revolves around the critique of the solidity of the vessel in our time. The investigation is an extension of the thesis that more architectural conponents can be textiles. Each vessel operates under a mono-print logic — a matrix with unique results.

October 1st - November 30th, 2022