SESSION: Visual Art and South Asian Textiles
Famed for their techniques, materials, processes of making, and the symbolism they evoke, textiles from South Asia have amassed significant connoisseurship owing to their value, collectability, and desirability. Textiles from the region are often couched within circuits of trade and value. With a few exceptions, the term ‘Textile Art’ is often used in the Western context, with textiles from this geography largely rendered as merely ‘craft’.
By proposing an alternative reading of South Asian textiles as art, the panel engages with this overlooked and previously unexplored appraisal. From temple hangings and paintings to their myriad manifestations as woven or knitted textiles, the two domains of art and textiles interlace in the textiles that emerge from this geography. In a nutshell, this panel situates textiles from South Asia within the history and practice of art. It stretches the definition of South Asian textiles beyond their crafting, skill and knowledge of making.
Session Convenors:
Pragya Sharma, Doctoral Researcher, University of Brighton (UK)
Pramila Choudhary, Doctoral Researcher, Concordia University (Canada)
Session Speakers:
Arpana Venu, VIT-AP University
Neethu P Antony, VIT-AP University
The Kalamkari Textile Spectrum
Located within the living continuum of South Asian textile art, Kalamkari in India converges creativity and cultural memory to challenge the existing Western binary of art and craft. The paper transcends this dichotomy and explores the fluid liminal nature of Kalamkari textiles. By tracing the evolution from the sixteenth century to the present, the study reveals a spectrum, from the sacred, hand-drawn Pen Kalamkari of Srikalahasti to the block-printed versions of Machilipatnam and the digitally produced textiles of Gujarat, where distinctions between art, craft, and commodity become porous. Among these three, the study seeks to position Pen Kalamkari as a textile art rather than a decorative craft, emphasising its visual qualities. Primarily grounded in the cultural theories of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall and a historiographical approach, this paper explores how Pen Kalamkari operates within living traditions where creativity and cultural labour intersect. By situating Pen Kalamkari within shifting terrains, the paper examines how technological and economic transformations reframed sacred artistry as a replicable craft and, eventually, as digital design. The study is significant as it positions Pen Kalamkari as a living archive of artistic transformation, revealing how South Asian textile traditions continually renegotiate the boundaries of art, craft, and modernity.
Imaan Markar, University of Cambridge
Barbara Sansoni’s Chromatic Loom: Women’s Labour, Decolonial Aesthetics, and Ecological Care
Barbara Sansoni’s (1928–2022) textile practice emerged from the intertwined histories of women’s labour, postcolonial art, and ecological thought in Sri Lanka. During the 1950s, Sansoni began designing textiles for a local convent in Wattala. In 1958, she established Barefoot, a network of handloom workshops employing rural women weavers. This collective redefined domestic craft as a site of creativity and collaboration, granting social mobility to women from marginalized communities. Through her creative practice and institution-building, Sansoni inverted colonial and patriarchal hierarchies that had long separated art from craft.
My presentation proposes a new reading of Sansoni’s work, demonstrating that her woven compositions were visual acts of decolonisation. Her chromatic structures redefined Lanka, both visually and materially, at a time when the postcolonial state was fracturing along ethnic and linguistic lines. Drawing from nature and architecture, she extracted colour and transposed local iconography into geometric grids reminiscent of modernist abstraction. Rejecting the muted tonalities of British design brought during colonialism, Sansoni reclaimed colour as a language of independence.
I will trace how Sansoni’s practice articulated an environmental consciousness from a postcolonial standpoint. I will draw attention to her hand-dyed cottons that feature reef fish, jungle plains, and monsoonal skies, evoking a vanishing landscape under threat from deforestation and urbanisation. Her textiles functioned as both memorial and resistance – woven ecologies that preserved the island’s sensory memory. Through these acts of making, Sansoni transformed the loom into a site where colour, gender, and nature converged to imagine a decolonial modernism for Lanka.
Akshatha Rangarajan, Monash University
Tailoring Monuments: Contested Histories in Contemporary Southeast Asian Art Textiles
This paper argues that contemporary art textiles in Southeast Asia reimagine how histories are remembered, interpreted, and contested. Through a close analysis of Seamstress Raffles (2015) by Jimmy Ong (b. 1964, Singapore) and A Leaf Through History: Family Tree (2022) by Chang Yoong Chia and Teoh Ming Wah (both b. 1975, Malaysia), the paper examines how these artists employ the commemorative and material possibilities of fabric to interrogate national and colonial memory.
The artworks invite an alternative interpretation of the monument or memorial, challenging officially sanctioned accounts and proposing new modes of public remembering and belonging. They can be understood as acts of dememorialisation—gestures that question what, whom, and why societies choose to commemorate. Within this inquiry, Ong’s as well as Chang and Teoh’s art textiles operate as counter-memorials exposing the politics of remembrance, while foregrounding how colonial and national histories are constructed, erased, and reinscribed through material form.
Significantly, the artists accomplish this through fabric’s material processes—acts of sewing, dyeing, and layering—that carry tactile and affective resonances. These gestures of touch and repair are not merely technical but about material tactility, connecting collective memory with embodied labour. Given that these practices are situated within the intertwined colonial histories of Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, the paper highlights how contemporary art textiles convey historical narratives. In doing so, the aesthetic and political possibilities of textiles in contemporary art from Southeast Asia are redefined.
Lesley S Pullen, SOAS, University of London
Ceremonial Cloth with Dancing Musicians: Gujarat for the Indonesian market
This paper explores the unique characteristics and historical importance of a notable Indian ceremonial cotton cloth known as a Sarasa in Indonesia. This piece was a highlight in an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, USA, from September 2025 to January 2026. Dating from the 13th to 14th century, this textile stands out as one of the earliest identified examples of an Indian trade cloth uncovered in maritime Southeast Asia.
Distinguished by its elongated ceremonial form, this Sarasa cloth is remarkable for its intricate visual storytelling. The design features female musicians accompanied by attendants, together with scenes of warriors in battle. Each figure is meticulously printed and dyed in red and indigo, with delicate outlines and carefully detailed dress patterns. Notably, the patterns on the figures vary with five distinct designs, each evoking the block-printed motifs evident in Western Indian Jain manuscripts of that period.
The creation of such a textile involved a combination of sophisticated methods. The figures were first block-printed and resist-dyed red, then overdyed with a contrasting indigo blue, possibly in separate workshops. This paper closely analyses the patterns depicted on each dancer’s dress and places them within a broader art-historical context.
Over subsequent centuries, the depiction of patterns on women’s dress, as well as the composition of the figures themselves, continued to evolve, but the textile in the Yale University Art Gallery collection remains a standout example for its fluid, free-hand treatment.
Shivani Kumari, Jamia Millia Islamia/ Devi Art Foundation
Possibilities of Political Textile Art: The Memorial Shawls and Sarongs of the Tangkhul Naga Community
This paper explores contemporary weaving practices of the Tangkhul Naga community in relation to the political conflict which has persisted in the Naga-inhabited hills of Manipur since the 1950s. The central argument of this paper is supported by the works of two ‘master’ weavers from the community: R. Pamringla Vashum (Tangkhul Naga, born 1972) and Zamthingla Ruivah Shimray (Tangkhul Naga, born 1963). The first section of the paper briefly introduces the history of political conflict in Manipur, examining how the unrest has impacted the community and their cultural production. The second part, which forms the focus of the paper, contextualises the textile weaving traditions within these histories, with special attention to the practices of Pamringla and Zamthingla. The weavers, each with varying levels of experience and engagement with Manipur’s political environment, respond differently to the state-sponsored violence within their practices. Their individual decisions to symbolically depict these events transform textiles from a mere site of handloom tradition towards a medium that effectively presents a documentary account of their lived experiences and resistance. Such an act holds space for the development of an alternative re-telling of lived realities, memory, and identity formations that run against the grain of mainstream media and state narrations. Reflecting on these textile traditions also reveals how the craft is often seen as static and reduced to its animistic and/or utilitarian aspects. In engaging with the history of weaving, therefore, the paper will explore the social construction of aesthetic discourse around textiles and its embodied collective consciousness.