Ukhrul, Feb 5: Renowned Tangkhul fashion designer, Zimik Easternlight is showcasing his creation at the ongoing ‘Indigenous Fashion Futures: A Living Archive’, presented by India Art Fair in association with Fashion Design Council of India on view from February 2 till February 9, 2025 at Delhi.
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A first-of-its-kind groundbreaking exhibition maps indigenous fashion identities of India through contemporary design. Curated by Sreyansi Singh, the exhibition ‘Indigenous Fashion Futures: A Living Archive’ is a groundbreaking moment of collaboration between India Art Fair and Fashion Design Council of India, the largest spaces in the region to platform and discover art and fashion respectively.
This exhibition leads a transformative approach with a group of emerging fashion practices with designers Boito (Odisha), Johargram (Jharkhand), 2112 Saldon (Ladakh) and East (Manipur) who are from diverse indigenous communities of India to create a new genre of ‘fashion installations’ that are clothes-first, all the while being informed by history, community, textile, craft and contemporary design.
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This is part of a larger project for the curator of identifying and mapping such fashion design practices. She positions them as “record-keepers of their ancestors, as living, unyielding archives for the future—breathing, singing, and resisting.”
The exhibition’s curatorial arch notes, “This contemporary indigenous clothes-making issues a new political power and social collectivism, that is harnessing legacies of generational knowledge and resilience, to create new systems of innovation. The research and development are situated beyond systematic fashion ateliers, instead at homes and fields, while people sing and sow. All towards building vocabularies of contemporary fashion design.” The exhibition mounts the proclamation that the framework of archives is not to museumise, but to generate a living tradition to formulate contemporary and future design, to derive new pedagogy, to resist demise, and occupy space. Their design practices become the ignition for a larger historical and cultural overture to revive, preserve and foresight, as basis for imagining relevant design for the future. The iconography of the ‘fashion installations’ is one with contexts embedded within—clothes-led, object-driven, political and anthropological, and business-forward.
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About the Curator:
Sreyansi Singh is a fashion curator and researcher with a clothes-first approach. Her curatorial priorities spread across deep research and development with the designers and makers, while creating intersections between pedagogy and business of fashion. She works between the points of a fashion historian and a futurist, interested in looking at clothes across time, through design and context. Her commitment is in searching for overlooked practices and objects in fashion, and creating new approaches of seeing, framing, and interacting. Her mission has been to position fashion as a serious line of cultural inquiry and study, excavating nuances of the societal, political and historical.
Gallery Address:
Triveni Kala Sangam, 205 Tansen Marg, Mandi House,
New Delhi
Gallery Hours:
03 – 09 February: 11 am – 8 pm
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