Textile specialist and curator Uthra Rajgopal together with visionary textile collector, patron and founder of Devi Art Foundation, Lekha Poddar, and textile artist Renuka Reddy share their deep research in the field of South Asian textiles and textile art, and highlight how they have been preserving, caring and forwarding textile histories in an enlightening conversation moderated by Meera Menezes, an art writer and independent curator.
Uthra Rajgopal: Uthra is an Independent Curator. Formerly at the Whitworth and the V&A she has developed a specialist interest in fibre arts and South Asian textiles. In 2019 Uthra received the Art Fund New Collecting Award, to build a collection of artworks connecting South Asia and the diaspora in England. Her curatorial practice includes the exhibitions Beyond Borders, Four Corners of One Cloth, Bodies of Colour, ReHang at Bikaner House in Delhi and most recently Cotton: Labour, Land and Body at the Crafts Council in London. Uthra is also the Associate Curator of the British Textile Biennial 2023.
Lekha Poddar: Philanthropist, businesswoman, art collector, and founder of the Devi Art Foundation, Lekha Poddar is a renowned patron for contemporary art, textile, and folk art. She is Co-Chair of the South Asian Acquisition Committee at Tate Modern, London, and is a member of the Tate International Council. She was also on the Asian Advisory Board of the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Renuka Reddy: Renuka Reddy’s work is a search for the perfect combination of cloth, milk, mordants, dung, dyes, and resists that propelled chintz into one of the most important textiles from India. Reddy has a background in textile crafts in India, automotive textiles in Detroit, USA and is based in Bangalore,India. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the KNMA and the TAPI Collection in India, the Fries Museum, Netherlands, the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, and the Kasteel d’Ursel, Belgium.
Meera Menezes: Meera Menezes is an art writer and independent curator. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary Indian art over the past three decades and is the author of V.S. Gaitonde: Sonata of Solitude. She writes for the arts magazine, Art India, is a regular contributor to the international arts publication Artforum and has contributed to The Hindu, Mint, Take on Art, The Indian Quarterly, The Wire, Firstpost and Critical Collective among others. Her most recent curatorial projects include Legal Alien as part of the Delhi Contemporary Art Week in 2022, as well as Yuva Sumbhava and Phantom Limb for the Raza Foundation. Her show Shadow Lines: Experiments with Light, Line and Liminality brought together several generations of Indian artists exploring abstraction. Menezes has done her Masters in German Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, and has worked as a TV-journalist and producer at the South Asia Bureau of ARD, Germany’s largest public service broadcaster, for over a decade.
Titled ‘Align & Disrupt’, the talks programme curated by independent curator and educator Shaleen Wadhwana, and supported by Shiv Nadar – Institution Of Eminence, aims to align voices of leading artists and arts professionals on critical issues in the arts ecosystem, and collectively disrupt the status quo to shape a more aware and inclusive art world of the future. For the first time, the key learnings and insights from these talks will be documented in an action-plan which will be widely circulated and made accessible to the public on the India Art Fair website. All talks will be conducted in Indian Sign Language.