The physique is first taught obedience via material. The swaddle earlier than speech, the college uniform earlier than dissent, disgrace earlier than pores and skin. Clothing is behavioural earlier than — and since — it’s cultural.
In Volume IV: Truths, Half-Truths, Half-Lies, Lies, Kolkata-based artist and clothier Kallol Datta invitations us to look at clothes as a protracted and loaded handbook of social instruction. Drawing from Lessons for Women, a 2,000-year-old guidebook written by Chinese historian Ban Zhao for her daughters, Datta unpacks how clothes have informed folks, particularly ladies, the right way to sit, stand, transfer, behave, belong, and be excluded.
Kallol Datta
| Photo Credit:
Rusha Bose
Rules written in thread
Zhao’s ebook could have been written as a method for moms to organize daughters for survival in a inflexible society, however its recommendation — on the right way to be modest, obedient, restrained — has caught round for millennia. It retains surfacing in new types: in Sixteenth-century Confucian revivalism, within the ‘values’ taught to ladies throughout cultures at the moment, in viral movies preaching ‘feminine behaviour’ and the brand new aspirational ‘trad wife’. All markers of neo-fascism and an imminent recession.
Datta was surprised by how acquainted the textual content felt. “While feminist movements and ideologies have evolved,” they are saying, “the dominant forces… continue to subscribe to antiquated notions of social and behavioural propriety.” Even at the moment, classes dressed up as care — particularly from mom to daughter — can quietly reinforce management.
Volume IV: Truths, Half-Truths, Half-Lies, Lies
| Photo Credit:
Anil Rane
Clothing is political
Datta, together with his kohl-rimmed eyes and love of all issues black, was a big determine on the Indian vogue scene — till the Central Saint Martins-trained “clothes maker” made the swap a couple of years in the past from mainstream vogue to artwork. Since then he’s tapped into textile, craft and his connections, however this time to discover clothes as websites of pressure. Like his 2022 showcase of textile sculptures, titled Volume 3, ISSUE 2, which regarded at the function of imperial edicts in Japan’s late Shōwa interval.
Volume IV is structured like a narrative in 4 components: Truths, Half-Truths, Half-Lies, and Lies Our Clothes Have Told Us. It travels throughout Asian clothes — from the Japanese kimono to the Manipuri phanek — to indicate how vogue has lengthy been used to sign standing, implement gender roles, and mark caste. The sari, usually seen as a timeless image of Indian femininity, is one of probably the most revealing examples. The shirt and petticoat, although they now appear inseparable from the unstitched garment, have been launched throughout colonial rule, formed by British-Victorian concepts of modesty. These details, usually tucked away from public reminiscence, are central to Datta’s work.
Their items — textile posters, sculptural types, and layered material compositions — are constructed from donated garments and stitched with historical past. In these collages of fabric, Datta asks: who will get to be snug? Who will get to maneuver freely? Who will get to be seen?
Poster 04 (Reconstructed kimono)
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Kallol Datta and Experimenter
Poster 18 (Reconstructed saries)
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Kallol Datta and Experimenter
Unbuilding the house
One of probably the most putting components of the present options two textile ground plans. The first maps out a Korean hanok (a standard home), the place the design displays inflexible gender roles: male quarters in entrance, feminine quarters at the again, separate doorways for servants and labourers. The second plan reimagines the home with solely ladies residing in it. Now, there are broad corridors, shared rooms, areas for leisure and ease.
In Datta’s imaginative and prescient, simply as clothes teaches us the right way to shrink ourselves, structure teaches us to shrink our motion; the place we’re allowed to go and the place we’re not. By redrawing these areas, they ask: what if properties have been constructed round freedom as an alternative of self-discipline?
Blueprint 01 (Reconstructed kimonos, saries, sarongs, kebayas and haori)
| Photo Credit:
Anil Rane
Blueprint 02 (Reconstructed phaneks, saries, haori, residence linen, and repurposed yarn)
| Photo Credit:
Anil Rane
Inherited stains
Each garment utilized in Volume IV comes with a reminiscence. “Every donation was accompanied by information from the donor… memories, episodic events connected to the items of clothing,” Datta shares. When outdated garments are handed on in elite areas, they’re referred to as classic vogue; however what’s seen as nostalgic for one group is seen as shameful for one more. In many Indian properties, as an illustration, garments worn by decrease caste home staff are stored separate, by no means touched, not to mention or reused. In Datta’s view, “class hierarchies and abject caste structures… continue to exist in the regions of my interest”. So, the artist’s act of accumulating and remodeling these textiles turns into a method of rejecting this imbalance and exhibiting how quietly and deeply caste and sophistication form even one thing as intimate as a hand-me-down.
Jeogori 15 (higher garment of the standard Korean hanbok)
| Photo Credit:
Vivian Sarky
Slow resistance
Where the state makes use of surveillance and legal guidelines to self-discipline, Datta makes use of slowness. Stitching, assembling, disassembling, their course of turns into a form of quiet refusal. “There are recurring motifs in the works that are markers of small acts of resistance, of dissent, lack of access to economic activity… Clothes, and by extension, cloth, will always remain our first line of defence,” says Datta, who collaborated with Kolkata-based Ek Tara Creates, which employs ladies from weak backgrounds, for the collection.
In Volume IV, the garment isn’t valuable or sacred, it’s unusual. Datta, nonetheless, doesn’t purpose to shock. They ask us to look once more. At the folds of our clothes. At the principles we’ve absorbed. The exhibition is rife with silences which are full of questions. If each sew is a sentence, then possibly the garments we put on are attempting to inform us one thing. If solely we’d hear.
Volume IV is on until August 20 at Experimenter in Mumbai.
The author is founding editor of Proseterity, a literary and humanities journal.
