A classical cloth, highly developed, ravenously in fashion circles reception, reinterpretation, and yet, very much a part of our everyday lives, the Saree is the life breath of India.. The most wondrous Festival saree, the amoebic pahnawa, traditions are kept alive with movement, of which the warp and weft to create a tribute to the ongoing attempts.
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The festival presents an exposition of Sarees created in diverse media and styles, using diverse techniques and artistic vocabularies. Platforms which foreground the Saree tend to focus on either one of its styles: traditional, or contemporary. Various Saree exhibitions and showings signal an engagement with the vast diversity of traditional Sarees created by weavers from different parts of India, also featuring interventions in this genre by contemporary designers. Much in contrast to this “traditional” approach, at the other end of the Saree spectrum is the reinterpretations of the Saree at a structural /formal level by contemporary designers trained in the discipline of fashion. A third stream of the Saree universe brings us to a new idiom – a language of digital print and graphics. This vocabulary is all pervasive, in its grand sweep from the big daddies of fashion to the street side Saree shops working with a mass produced industrial aesthetic.
The Saree Festival attempts to be this unalloyed, all pervasive love affair with the drape, in bringing together the vast richness of styles, materials, traditions, techniques, experiments, vocabularies, sensibilities, that can all achieve fruition under the never ending swirl of the Saree.
We do not want just this or just that, if it is the Saree, we want it all, to experience the magical transformation of the Saree, in all its mind boggling avatars.
