Tag Archive "india"

Kanthas at the PMA; women’s art of Bengal

Kanthas are delightful and appealing vernacular textiles, fashioned from of bits and pieces of worn clothing and embroidered with figurative designs by the women of Bengal (now divided between the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh).  Some of their charms are akin to childrens’ book illustrations, others to comic books and vernacular art of various origins: lines of dancing girls as tightly coordinated as the Rockettes; plants, birds, beasts and humans interlocked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; elephants and horses carrying all sorts of riders and at least one horse sitting astride a man. 

The Human Scale of Recycling in India

Enrico Fabian is a German-born, Delhi-based photographer whose work is on display at the India Habitat Center. Fabian spent three months in 2008 working alongside the NGO Chintan documenting the daily life of the Kabari, a general term used for people in India who collect and sell recyclable materials. Fabian’s show consists of about two dozen 44 inch x 32 inch framed photographs, each with an explanatory printed caption underneath. You walk clockwise around the space, each photograph leading you into the next, like a photoessay. It is an eye-opening show on the topic of waste recycling and how it ... More » »

Chandighar, City of Tomorrow, part 2

Part 1 of this post can be found here Chandigarh was a project taken on by Le Corbusier in 1951, after the original architects Matthew Nowicki and Albert Mayer (of Mayer, Whittlesey & Glass of New York) ended the project following Nowicki’s death in a plane crash. The city was planned as the new capital of Punjab, following Partition in 1947 (when India was divided by the British into India and Pakistan – Hindu and Muslim). It was a city for the generations to come – a very optimistic 1950s industry-fueled venture as stated by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharal ... More » »

Chandigarh, India’s City of Tomorrow

We arrived in Chandigarh two days ago. This means we’ve been traveling officially for 11 days in India- my and my boyfriend’s first time, our friend‘s second time, and we have another 4 weeks ahead of us. I’d been looking forward to seeing Chandigarh, an masterpiece in architectural and urban planning by Le Corbusier, for awhile now, but I can’t really explain how extraordinary it is without first explaining our experience so far in other cities in India.