Monday 16 September 2019 – 06.15 pm Inauguration
On display till Friday 20 September 2019 from 10.00am to 06.00pm
Cocoa and Jasmine is a multidisciplinary cultural platform that documents and facilitates cross cultural projects and stories. The Founder has curated an exhibition display called SAFED, that celebrates the simplicity and diversity of the arts and culture of our country via handloom textile crafts of India. SAFED, that means white in Hindi, becomes a unifying factor of these different textiles yet each are distinct in textures.
Through the exhibit we encourage the viewer to appreciate the detail of the human emotion in these textiles. Sayali, The curator says, “While travelling to different textile regions in India, I was always fascinated with the workshops and homes of dyers, embroiders and weavers. Some of these workshops had loose white fabric hung for natural bleaching, and this experience evoked almost a spiritual feeling in me. I wish to translate this experience for the viewer. A common string in most textile crafts of India is white fabric, a blank canvas. Through this project, I also wish to showcase the unity of our craftsmen yet bring out the diversity in textures. When a weaver weaves fabric, a little bit of himself is woven into it as well, thus each fabric displayed here holds the artisan's emotions as if the artisan was present here. If you look carefully at these fabrics, they are all different and unique and have an individual soul yet we can appreciate them as one, just like Indian crafts.”
SAFED is part of The Craft Project initiated by Cocoa and Jasmine that documented tangible anthropology i.e material culture of a place and comment on its relevance in the contemporary space. For this we travelled to Ladakh, Varanasi, Maheshwar, Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Jaipur to document crafts like Natural Dyeing, Kalamkari, Kantha, Handloom weaving, Block printing and also meet and interview craftsmen and designers.
Objective
● To voice contemporary Indian arts, crafts and design globally that are rooted in tradition on a global platform, thus making them more accessible and inclusive.
● Celebrate diversity in culture through materials
● Facilitate collaboration and dialogue within the creative community of makers and curators globally, thus promoting cross-cultural work and exchange of ideas that have a socio-cultural impact.
● Understand the value of cultural documentation.
● put a focus on minimalistic and simple aesthetics of traditional Indian crafts.