Continuing Traditions - Softcover

The age of exploration was one in which a confident and wealthy Europe was ready to look at the world in different ways. By this time, the emerging European immigration could see the 'world' as an imagined or designated concept. Textiles brought the colours of the 'other' lands, and its mass printing and production brought a sense of fantasy and playfulness into European homes. This book follows the reflections on inter-relationships between textiles, trade and non-performing visual arts of India. The volume has been brought out in conjunction with a travelling exhibition in India called "Safar-nama: Journeys through a Kalamkari Hanging", an exhibition of digital prints of an ancient painted fabric piece in the kalamkari tradition, which prevailed in the Coromandel Coast, and is now housed at the Museum of Printed Textiles of Mulhouse in France, along with "Continuing Traditions", a show contemporary artists and designers whose works can relate to it. The book showcases the works of contemporary India artists who have used selective aspects of textiles craft or textile imagery as inputs in their practice. After a long modernist interregnum in which the sole objective was to create a thing-in-itself, these works emerge as a postmodernist re-assertion of interrelationship between worldly phenomenon.

Pranabranjan Ray graduated from Visva Bharati, Santiniketan and got his Masters degree from Calcutta University, in social sciences. He worked as a social scientist for the Government of West Bengal. He has been founders member and secretary of the Society of Contemporary Artist, Calcutta, for 25 years. Ray has written numerous research papers on the visual artists, cinema and social sciences and has been an art critic with many Indian publications. He is the author of several books and has curated number of exhibitions. Surajit Sarkar was at one time a photocopier salesman, a bank officer, a primary school teacher and a developer of curriculum for primary schools. He has created weekly television programmes as well as documentary and educational films. Since 2001 he has worked as a video artist for theatre and dance productions, and as a multimedia installation artist.