Experience immersive textile installations where art and craft meet
TORONTO, ON, February 8, 2022 – This spring, ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) invites visitors to experience a series of immersive textile installations created by contemporary artist Swapnaa Tamhane, on display from March 12 to August 1, 2022. Organized by ROM, 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.
“ROM is committed to supporting artists who are shifting the global conversation on how art is made and expressed and to opening the door to new and diverse voices,” says Josh Basseches, ROM Director & CEO. “This exhibition of Swapnaa Tamhane’s large, immersive textile works of art offers audiences an opportunity to discover the transformative practices of this emerging artist.”
At the heart of the exhibition are three cotton cloth installations composed of heavily patterned block-printed 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.
“These works need to be experienced in person as they create spaces that inspire and uplift on a felt level,” says Deepali Dewan, ROM’s Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture and the curator of Mobile Palace. “They are a part of Tamhane’s larger practice of making a mark as an act of resistance. The impression of a woodblock onto a textile surface, the clinging of dye to mordant, thread piercing through fabric, line drawn on paper – all of these are marks that disrupt one sense of order and make a claim for a different one. In this way, pattern has never been simply about decoration. It is about how making a mark can shape new ways of seeing, thinking and being in the world.”
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.
“These artworks propose new modes of collaborating with artisans and explore the possibilities of ornamentation to tell a larger story,” says artist Swapnaa Tamhane. “My process and these works resist how hierarchies of art, craft, and design were determined by colonial ideas.”
Swapnaa Tamhane aims to destabilize and untether colonial constructs as an artist, curator and writer. Tamhane has a wide-ranging artistic practice, and her body of work includes drawing, textiles, handmade paper, text, and sculpture. Based in Montreal, Tamhane has previously exhibited her work at A Space Gallery in Toronto, Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa and articule in Montreal.
The exhibition is generously supported by Lead Exhibition Patron Dan Mishra with additional support from the Canada Council for the Arts. The Dan Mishra South Asia Initiative, launched in 2017, established a newly endowed curatorial position and sustainable funding for exhibitions, public engagement, research, and learning activities that support and enhance the ROM’s commitment to South Asian art and culture.
Key works in the exhibition were created through the support of ROM’s IARTS Textiles of India grant, for which Tamhane was selected as the 2019-20 recipient. The grant was established in honour of the late Arti Chandaria to celebrate the splendour and influence of Indian textile arts. On display on ROM’s Level 3, Third Floor Centre Block, Swapnaa Tamhane: Mobile Palace is included with ROM general admission.
Visiting ROM: Visitors are encouraged to purchase timed tickets in advance. All visitors ages 12 and older must show proof of full vaccination when entering the Museum. See the online Visitor Guidelines for more information.
CONTACTS: ROM Communications media@rom.on.ca Sophie von Hahn, Senior Publicist svhahn@rom.on.ca *Email is preferred during COVID-19 work-from-home protocols
ABOUT ROM Opened in 1914, Royal Ontario Museum showcases art, culture and nature from around the world and across the ages. Among the top 10 cultural institutions in North America, Canada’s largest and most comprehensive museum is home to a world-class collection of 13 million art objects and natural history specimens, featured in 40 gallery and exhibition spaces. As the country’s preeminent field research institute and an international leader in new and original findings, ROM plays a vital role in advancing our understanding of the artistic, cultural and natural world. Combining its original heritage architecture with the contemporary Daniel Libeskind-designed Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, ROM serves as a national landmark, and a dynamic cultural destination in the heart of Toronto for all to enjoy.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
