Heirloom Samplers: Experimental Embroidery of Emotions | Project Showcase@IFA with Nalini Balakumar and Vanitha | December 18, 2024

Join us for our next Project Showcase@IFA with Nalini Balakumar and Vanitha who will share their experiences of working on a project as part of the Explorations category of our Arts Practice programme. 

Nalini and her mother Vanitha explored knitting and embroidery as healing tools, focusing on the intergenerational trauma of Dalit-Christian life in Tamil Nadu in the project Heirloom Samplers. Through intimate mother-daughter conversations, Nalini and Vanitha used these practices to cope with pain and create a safe space for difficult emotions. Through the course of the project, Nalini reflected on her late awareness of casteism and its influence on personal achievements, and examined caste-based discrimination. The project blends art, history, and memory, incorporating oral histories, fabric experiments including cyanotype, embroidery work, and cross-stitch, to address trauma and identity.

Nalini and Vanitha will share their artistic processes during the project and the collaborative art making experience. They will also be in conversation with Shobha Talengala.

Heirloom Samplers: Experimental Embroidery of Emotions
Wednesday, December 18, 2024 | 06:30 PM IST onwards

Register on Zoom or join us on Facebook Live

Nalini Balakumar and Vanitha are a mother-daughter artist duo based in Mysuru. Their interests lie in exploring family history, memory, and trauma through psychosocial geographies and landscapes. As two women who enjoy drifting and observing, they explore the relationship between their city, self and lived experiences through inter-media practices such as photography, cyanotype, and textile. 

Shobha Talengala is an art historian who shuttles between Delhi and Mysuru. She is interested in visual anthropology—particularly the performative and material cultures of southern India and Karnataka—and museum discourses around folk and tribal collections. She is currently working as a consultant for Deccan Heritage Foundation India on the collections of Jayalakshmi Vilas Mansion, Mysuru.

Nalini Balakumar is the Project Coordinator of the Foundation Project implemented by IFA under the Arts Practice programme, made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.