CABINET
24 May – 5 July, 2025
Patel Brown
21 Wade, Unit 2
Toronto, ON
Pattern, like the internal, guiding rhyme of verse, or examples of symmetrical balance found in nature, provides an occasion for the expression of entanglements. In the suite of works presented in Cabinet, Swapnaa Tamhane approaches the structure of pattern from a variety of angles: gestures that emerge as recognizable over the course of time; formational patterns of woven textiles; impressions of architectural plans passed back and forth between two and three dimensionality.
Here, pattern functions to capture the moment when an element previously concealed emerges into visibility. While composing the Fence watercolour series, Tamhane first layered water and paint before adding an outline overtop, as a way to evoke the feeling that part of the page remained submerged, or, conversely, was surfacing. Within the repeated action of drawing with paint was an exercise in attempting to maintain a straight line, to achieve uniformity, which was ultimately unsuccessful. The irregular extrusions in the linked fence pull the viewer into the underlayer of these images, raising questions of how space is being delineated by the fence, and what persists in bleeding through boundaries.
The composite motifs in Burmese Teak I and Burmese Teak II are based on the Burmese teak panelled walls of the auditorium in Le Corbusier’s Textile Mill Owners’ Association Building, Ahmedabad (1954). The block-printing process used to compose this work is an extension of Tamhane’s drawing practice, based on marks, time, and an accumulation of both. Each block is a different dye process in order to achieve a particular colour. By separating out and then putting into proximity the line and filler motifs (rekh and datta), Tamhane considers each motif as a being constituted by multiple parts, and in turn, as composing a larger image. Burmese Teak II was dyed twice in indigo, in a process known as Meena, creating a similar feeling of submergence as in the Fence series. The motifs traverse the indigo-dyed cotton panels, phrase-like, or perhaps caught in a fluctuating breeze, as the addition of beads catch, and refract back, light.
For Tamhane, the mirrored monolith echoes the closets of her aunts, her cousins, her friends, or her mother. They each possess innate knowledge of, and reverance for, the specificities and complexity of the weaves that come together to form textiles stored in such cabinets. Elliptical, yet on the cusp of familiarity, the patterns in Bird’s-Eye 1 and Bird’s-Eye 2 are based on aerial views of the layout of adobe home villages in Kutch, in the state of Gujarat. Like two questions posed from the vantage of a passing bird, these shish-kam, or mirror embroidery works, translate the village layouts into patterns, and point to how architectural constructions reflect our relationship to form back at us.
Cabinet asks us to consider the simultaneity of indigenous architecture in the contemporary milieu, and the network of repetitive gestures that underpin our visual field.
As the poet Bhanu Kapil writes, structure is empathy.— Emily Zuberec
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Summoning the Ineffable: Braxton Garneau, Sukaina Kubba, Marigold Santos, Dominique Sirois, Sergio Suárez and Swapnaa Tamhane
February 27 to April 12, 2025
Patel Brown
372 rue Ste-Catherine O,#410
Montréal, QC
H3B 1A2
patelbrown.com
+1 514 868 9688
Patel Brown is proud to present Summoning the Ineffable where we are presented with a polyphonic expression of the stories that materials contain. All mediums are perpetually in relation to histories of production, consumption, extraction, and creation. Here, the artists explore the affective dimensions of materials that have been passed through hands and across generations, a reminder that small gestures accumulate into expansive possibility.
If human positionalities are the product of social and historical determinism, so are our human forms the consolidation of sweeping and varied material: data, anecdotes, plastics, grit, dust, beads, rain. Materials tell tellurian stories of attention to earthly cycles, the advent of polymers, cosmological origin, and the human phenomenological experience of navigating these elements.
- Emily Zuberec and Roxanne Arsenault
Installation view of Sightings 43: Never Was A Man, a project by Swapnaa Tamhane, Montreal, 2025. Courtesy of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro
SIGHTINGS 43
February 24 to May 24, 2025
Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal
curated by Julia Eilers Smith
A project by Swapnaa Tamhane
Never Was a Man draws on two sentences from the suicide letter of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit scholar and PhD student of sociology at Hyderabad Central University, transforming them into a wood block print. Vemula’s last words became a symbol of Dalit resistance, shedding light on caste-based discrimination in universities and leading to mass student protests across India.
SIGHTINGS is located on the ground floor of the Hall Building: 1455, blvd. De Maisonneuve West and is accessible weekdays and weekends from 7 am to 11 pm. The program is developed by Julia Eilers Smith.
Do Hands Have a Chance?, block print and dyes on mill-made cotton, currently on view at Sculpture Park Jaipur, Madhavendra Palace.
The Sculpture Park at Madhavendra Palace opens Feb 26, 2023
The Golden Fibre, V&A Dundee, Scotland
June 2022-June 2023
The experiences of jute labourers in Dundee and Kolkata will be explored in a new commission at V&A Dundee opening today (Friday 24 June), developed in partnership with Dundee Heritage Trust and the University of Dundee. Artist, curator and writer Swapnaa Tamhane has been inspired by archives held at the University of Dundee and Verdant Works, which is run by Dundee Heritage Trust. Her research explores the colonial context of jute and the lives of workers in and around Kolkata in the early 19th and 20th Century. Jute was known as the ‘golden fibre’ because of the huge profits that were made from it, though those profits were rarely shared with workers in Dundee or in what was then British-ruled Bengal, now split between Bangladesh and India. In the 19th century workers in Bangladesh and India harvested raw jute to be shipped to Dundee for processing and manufacturing, and by the early 20th century they worked in mills in and around Kolkata that were mostly managed by Scots. That shift is seen as helping to accelerate the decline of the jute industry in Dundee, by moving manufacturing closer to the source.
Tamhane’s work is called The Golden Fibre and is now installed in V&A Dundee’s Scottish Design Galleries. It is a collage of archival photographs and drawings of female workers as well as microscopic images of jute paper that the artist makes by hand. This laborious process involves cutting up jute cloth, soaking it in the caustic chemical lye, then beating it in water for hours to create a pulp that is then shaped and dried into rough sheets of paper.
Part of the work is an installation called Tum Banglá mat bolo, ham kuchh nahín samajhtá hai (You don’t speak Bengali, I can’t understand anything). It features extracts from a Hindustani language exercise book used by Scottish supervisors to control workers in the Bengali mills. Colonial attitudes are revealed through translations of orders such as ‘Hurry up’, ‘Keep quiet’, ‘Do not waste oil’ and ‘Do not make any noise’.
The work explores how the colonial system connected workers across the continents, so hand tools used in the Dundee mills and factories, including a bale hook, hackle, porter gauge and pair of weaving scissors from Verdant Works, are also on display.
Many workers saw these tools as being like extra fingers on their hands. They were not provided by the employer but had to be purchased by the workers from local ironmongers and cobblers. Tamhane sees the potential of these objects for connecting us with the skilled people in Dundee and Calcutta upon whom this global industry depended.
Meredith More, Curator at V&A Dundee, said: “Since 2020 V&A Dundee has reframed displays and interpretation in the Scottish Design Galleries to acknowledge that much of Scotland’s design history is built upon the exploitation of enslaved and colonised people around the world. Tamhane’s new work starts a conversation and allows us to dig deeper into a local story with a huge transnational context. It opens up an important conversation about Dundee's relationship with colonialism and how people across continents have been impacted by it, in many different ways."
Swapnaa Tamhane said: “I think about the role of the hand and the handmade in relation to drawing or making paper from either cotton or jute. I am curious about how this may connect me to the hands of many others across continents who have harvested, processed and manufactured these materials over centuries. After the paper is pressed, I put handmade jute paper under a microscope and could see how the fibres bind together arbitrarily. To me, they become a metaphor for a protest against order and structure. In the commission for V&A Dundee, I wanted to focus in on the lives of women in the Bengali jute industry. Some of them were widows, some were fleeing their homes, some were supplementing the household incomes. Most of the women who worked in the fields to harvest raw jute were undocumented as part of the workforce. The archival images I came across are precious traces of their lives, about which we know very little.”
The display is available to see for free as part of V&A Dundee’s Scottish Design Galleries. It has been curated by V&A Dundee and Mother Tongue, a curatorial practice based in Glasgow, who are also developing a programme of complementary content and events.
As part of this, visitors can view the photographs and documents that have inspired Tamhane’s work, along with complementary articles, videos and links, here: https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/info/the-golden-fibre-online-resources
The work has been supported by V&A Dundee and the Ontario Arts Council.
For media enquiries, please contact press@vandadundee.org
Mother Tongue
Mother Tongue is a research-led, independent curatorial practice working locally and internationally, formed in 2009 by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden. They produce exhibitions, film programmes, discursive events, essays and publications that challenge the whiteness of Scottish art history narratives. They work with galleries, museums, archives, and festivals and have undertaken residencies in Scotland, Sweden, Finland and Barbados.
@MTcurating
V&A Dundee
V&A Dundee is Scotland’s design museum. Designed by Kengo Kuma, the museum is at the centre of Dundee’s reimagined waterfront and is part of the V&A family of museums that celebrate creativity in all its forms from across centuries, for everyone. V&A Dundee features world-class exhibitions alongside the permanent Scottish Design Galleries, and a changing programme of commissions, events and activities. The new museum was created by Design Dundee Ltd with the support of its founding partners: the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dundee City Council, the University of Dundee, Abertay University and Scottish Enterprise.
@VADundee