Rupa Paul

This Foundation Project, implemented by IFA under Explorations will involve the making of a site-responsive artistic exploration with the fading design archives of the artist’s father, in their ancestral house in Big Bazar, North Kolkata. Through drawing, textile, moving image, projection, voice, found objects, it explores how a private family archive can become a public enquiry into memory, inheritance, and Kolkata’s fading visual culture of the 1960s. Rupa Paul is the Coordinator for this project. 

Rupa Paul is a Delhi-based contemporary artist born in Kolkata whose multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, moving image, performance, and site-responsive installations. Rooted in her family lineage connected to the traditional clay doll-making practices of Krishnanagar and Kumartuli, West Bengal, her work engages with memory, domesticity, care, personal archives, and fragile material traces of time. Rupa has participated in art residencies and exhibitions across Austria, Spain, Singapore, Russia, China, the UAE, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. Given her experience, Rupa Paul is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project titled BAPI: An Archaeology of Design Memory will involve the making of a site-responsive artistic exploration that will engage with a fading archive of handmade surface designs, tracing-paper batik patterns, linoleum motifs, and objects created by the artist Rupa Paul’s father in Kolkata, including a batik saree designed by her father and presented to Queen Elizabeth II during her 1961 visit to India. The project will be situated in the artist’s ancestral home in Bagbazar, North Kolkata. The artist will approach this private family collection, not as a restored historical narrative, but as a public inquiry into memory and Kolkata’s decaying 1960s visual culture. The project will unpack how design intelligence lived through the body, hand, and touch before digital tools, and what survives after a maker’s socio-economic context has disappeared. 

The artistic process will include the making of three distinct rooms in the ancestral home, transforming the domestic architecture as a narrative device, with an archival table holding original 1960s designs alongside family photographs, a series of drawings, and moving images. The project will unfold as a multi-disciplinary gathering to collectively read the archive, addressing labour, women's inheritance, and forgotten design histories.

The outcome of the project will be a site-specific installation, including a series of graphic drawings, a series of moving images, a digital archive, and a public gathering. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be the visual documentation of the artistic process.   

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to bridge personal memory and design history, evaluating the embodied, hand-based labour of 1960s surface design, while illuminating how fragile cultural heritage, ephemeral craft knowledge, and intergenerational narratives quietly persist through time. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm by convening an online gathering of artists coordinating Explorations projects. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

This project is made possible with support from the Prasanta Niyogi Arts Legacy Initiative.