Exhibition | Slaves of Fashion: New Works by The Singh Twins
Now on view at the Walker Art Gallery:
Slaves of Fashion: New Works by The Singh Twins
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 19 January — 20 May 2018
Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 21 July — 16 September 2018
Slaves of Fashion: New Works by The Singh Twins explores the history of Indian textiles, Empire, enslavement and luxury consumerism, and the contemporary relevance of these issues in the world today. Focusing on the relationship between Britain and India, hidden details of Europe’s colonial past and its legacies are uncovered, including current debates around ethical trade and responsible consumerism.
The exhibition showcases almost 20 new artworks by the internationally-renowned artists, Amrit and Rabindra Singh. Primarily known for their entirely hand-painted work in the Indian miniature tradition, The Singh Twins’ new work combines traditional hand-painting techniques with digitally created imagery. The series includes 11 digital fabric artworks displayed on lightboxes, with each one highlighting a different theme relating to India’s textile industry. A further nine paper artworks explore the relationship between trade, conflict, and consumerism in an age of Empire and the modern day. Also included in the exhibition are 40 highlights from over 100 objects across National Museums Liverpool’s collection, which have inspired the exhibition.
This exhibition is a collaboration between National Museums Liverpool, The Singh Twins, and Professor Kate Marsh, University of Liverpool. Slaves of Fashion: New works by The Singh Twins has been developed in partnership with Wolverhampton Art Gallery, and the exhibition will tour to Wolverhampton Art Gallery from 21 July to 16 September 2018.
The artworks in this exhibition reflect the artists’ views, not those of the Walker Art Gallery or National Museums Liverpool
Call for Papers | Artisans of the Surface in Early Modern Europe
From H-ArtHist:
Artisans of the Surface in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1750
King’s College London, 20–21 September 2018
Proposals due by 8 June 2018
This workshop focuses on the practices of a range of artisans (tailors, barbers, cooks, cheesemakers, gardeners, and agronomists) and their relationships with the fields of meteorology, botany, natural history, medicine, earth sciences, and veterinary medicine. These artisans and their practices shared a set of skills related to the observation and manipulation of human and non-human surfaces. We will explore how, and if, practical knowledge about the surface of things and bodies (and their storage and preservation in relation to specific environmental conditions) led to the concept of nature and matter as composed of layers, and how such a framework contributed to the demise of traditional Galenic and Aristotelian views on nature.
This workshop also aims at getting past the dichotomies between quantitative and qualitative knowledge and between natural philosophy and the arts, and so we intend to broaden the focus to include a set of artisans who have traditionally remained invisible from accounts of this ‘age of the new’. We will explore the many different ways in which ‘modern science’ emerged, the relationships between social and cognitive practices, and the contribution that non-mathematical sciences gave to the mental habits of observing, collecting, experimenting with, and manipulating natural matter.
We welcome proposals, in particular, that address the relationships between gardening, natural history, and medicine; cooking and knowledge; work on animal skin; leatherwork; or veterinary medicine. Proposals (up to 250 words) for 20-minute papers should be sent to Paolo Savoia at renaissanceskin@kcl.ac.uk by 8 June 2018.
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