Arnika Ahldag, Vaishnavi Kambadur
The intimate walkthrough with Arnika Ahldag and Vaishnavi Kambadur will take you through shared histories of tie-dyed textiles in the exhibition Painted Stitches Woven Stories II. Using MAP’s collection, the curators will closely share their stories and speculations as they unravel every knot and weave to highlight the textile’s relationship with its makers and keepers.
Associate Curator - Exhibitions, MAP Bengaluru
Arnika Ahldag is the associate curator at MAP. As an art historian, she investigates the representation of labour in Indian contemporary art. Her curatorial projects include the public programme for IAF 2020 and Mapping Gender: Bodies and Sexualities in the Global South at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. As an artist she works in video and performance and her recent projects were shown at the Bhubaneswar Art Trail, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art and Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi. She co-founded the Feminist Syllabus, which is part of the workshop series Pact of Silence, How to break it, a programme for intersectional feminist discourses in the arts. Over the past years she lectured at the National School of Drama and OP Jindal Global University in New Delhi. She is a PhD candidate at JNU and holds an MA from University College in London, UK and Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany.
Assistant Curator - Exhibitions, MAP Bengaluru
Vaishnavi Kambadur is an assistant curator at the Museum of Art & Photography, Bengaluru. Her research investigates the practice of making cloth and addresses its challenges in the context of labour, culture and fashion theory. She has over 8 years of experience from working with research archives, retail web stores, garment factories to designing textiles. Her most recent virtual exhibition on hair practices in India was published in VMIS (Virtual Museum of Images and Sounds).
Previously, Kambadur held internships at Christie’s and Textile Arts Center, New York, and assisted in teaching courses like history of fashion and fashioning micro-utopias. She holds a MA in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design, New York and a Bachelor’s degree in Knitwear Design from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, New Delhi.
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A Lifetime of Stitches May 18, 2021
Art as a Storyteller June 25, 2021
The Evolving Local July 17, 2021