New Indian Designscapes - Press Rlease

New India Designscape December 14, 2012 – February 24, 2013 Triennale Design Museum Triennale Design Museum continues the cycle about new international design in the MINI&Triennale CreativeSet area with a new selection of the most interesting works by contemporary Indian designers, curated by Simona Romano, in collaboration with Avnish Mehta.

New India Designscape describes the complexity of a context, of a landscape laden with interrelations and relentless questions on the project, rather than the immobility of national identities and self-centered figures, as was the case with past generation masters.

The selected young designers are permeated by Indian culture, but at the same time they are strongly contaminated by other contexts, mostly the Western ones. With their projects the designers offer a delicate and sublime balance between innovation and tradition.

Mythical contests are often presented, with a certain amount of irony, in common-use objects (e.g. Sandip Paul’s Mr Prick, Sahil and Sartak’s Lotus pieces, Divya Thakur’s Cheerharan Toilet Paper, or Cut.ok.Paste by Mira Malhotra, and again Hanuman T­shirt by Lokesh Karekar, Manish Arora’s clothes, and Kangan Arora’s Varanasi Cows) to prove that old and contemporary, sacred and profane blend into something that may not be readily deciphered (by not Indians), and bring deep contents into daily life. In our global era, the effect, needless to say, is almost therapeutic.

Other objects start from the local material culture (a tough challenge, since common traditional Indian objects tend to have a hardly surpassed content in terms of modernity, function and aesthetics), they re-think it through innovation of some typologies (e.g. Paul’s Disposable Mug) or use common semi-finished products to create others (Sahil and Sartak’s Choori Lamp, Hanif Kureshi’s letterings, Shilpa Chevan’s jewelry).

The displayed objects also feature suggestions of a less exposed to the media India, which looks at different social statuses with a matter-of-factly attitude that is never passive and takes shape more or less consciously, in other almost surreal objects such as Gunjan Gupta’s Bori Cycle Throne; in this comparative effort it was quite inevitable to bring back the post-colonial relation between India and Great Britain to the surface (Geetika Alok’s Englishes lettering).

The practical life in the thousands of villages scattered over rural India is the inspiration to the so-called barefoot design where a pedal-operated washing machine (Reyma Josè) and a bamboo structure to load and carry weights on

the shoulders (Vikram Dinubhai Panchal), make a difference in terms of quality, for lives that are pretty hard.

Design, though, often has a dialogue with the sophisticated rural craftsmanship tradition to redesign traditional objects (Aneeth Arora’s clothes, Sandeep Sangaru and Andrea Norohda’s bamboo furniture design, Garima Aggarwal Roy’s projects, Rajiv Jassal’s Flying bird and Singing Leaves, Sanders and Kandula’s Natural dishes, Vijay Sharma’s Bambike bamboo bicycle) or boost the small local economy (M.P. Ranjan’ Bamboo Cubes, Priyanka Tolia’s Chitku works).

Urban and technology driven India, though, stands out for process and semifinished product development rather than design; it finds a sort of alter ego in Padmaja Krishnan’s (Excess mobile and Wood Pc) and Ranjit Makkuni’s work (designer of sophisticated interactive installations that somehow connect with the sacred).

India, also in the design field, is hard to categorize, decipher, reduced to a system. There are at once designers who stay with the purpose of changing things (in lack of companies, there are may small-series, self-made productions), those who return after long periods spent abroad to train and work, or those who work many miles away from the great mother without ever forgetting about her in their projects.

The Indian designscape is a very rich landscape, producing new content through the different forms of the dialogue between tradition and modernity for a global and fast-changing global society, which as such is always looking for its ancestral origin.

New India Designscape December 14, 2012 – February 24, 2013 MINI&Triennale CreativeSet, Triennale Design Museum Curated by Simona Romano, in collaboration with Avnish Mehta Exhibition design: Kavita Singh Kale Catalogue: Corraini Edizioni The CreativeSet exhibitions are a project directed by Silvana Annicchiarico Entrance: € 2.00 Hours: Thuesdays-Sundays 10.30 am - 8.30 pm Thursdays 10.30 am - 11.00 pm Exhibition + Triennale Design Museum € 8.00 Triennale Design Museum viale Alemagna 6 phone +39 02 724341 fax 02 89010693 www.triennaledesignmuseum.org Press office phone +39 02 72434241 fax +39 02 72434239

damiano.gulli@triennale.org