Why is Kallol Datta working with repurposed kimonos and Kanjeevaram sarees?

The clothesmaker’s new solo exhibition at Kolkata’s Experimenter is a multi-cultural exploration of garments as a tool for artistic expression

It’s been five years since the debut solo show of sculptured textiles by Kolkata-based artist-clothesmaker Kallol Datta at Experimenter, the city’s most exciting hub for contemporary art. Datta, 39, prefers to be called simply “clothesmaker”. His new works, part of his second solo Volume 3 Issue 2, created over two years as part of his ongoing inquiry in native clothing practices of South-West Asia, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the Korean Peninsula, opened at Experimenter on 15 July.

Datta gave us a virtual tour of the freshly mounted show before it opened. While not the most experiential or interactive of tours, it was a window into how Datta’s artistic process is about immersive research, artistic thinking and astonishing malleability while handling garments. And respect for his subject. The show’s brochure has a mention of the donors of vintage clothing used in it: Shiroto Harumi, Kurashima Emiko, Kanta Jhangiani, Nivedita Bairagi and others. Volume 3 Issue 2 is a sophisticated and funky congruence of textile—the history, memory and functionality of each piece heightened by their construction—design, art and a traditional sense of fashion, particularly the way a garment has been worn in a particular culture or society.

Experiments with material

Repurposed kimonos (from the Late Showa period in Japan), haoris, obies, angrakhas and Kanjeevaram sarees acquire meaning through the way Datta makes structural experiments with them. He skews traditional geometry and creates silhouettes which shroud, swaddle and cocoon the body. Some of the works hang on wall panels while some are mounted on the floor. The asymmetry in the works are in sync with the gallery’s architectural fluidity—at its centre is a pit, the centre of which is the seat of one of the largest works in the show.

These works are more minimalistic and austere. Barring tassels and knots, there are hardly any superfluous flourishes—only the fluidity of garment in structured asymmetry—than those in his solo Random Access (2017). Datta has said that the shoulders are the axis on which his garments revolve around. They are sexless and shapeless in a strict sense of covering a human body—the body, more like a collapsed circle. The body then adapts to the garment and not the other way round. Through these works, Datta questions the materials he uses and their apparent tenacity, juxtaposing several rare handwoven textiles not only in stitching together new sculptures with the fabrics he collects, but delving deeper into ideas of cultural sustainability, post-war politics in Japanese clothing edicts and personal memories. “I grew up in West Asia and that led it to being the first region I conducted creative research on. It was built from thereon,” Datta tells The Established.

Traditional garments turn showpieces

The origins of Volume 3 Issue 2 go back to a residency at Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, Japan in 2021, which led him to traditional garments worn after the war, especially in peri-urban and rural areas of the Tohoku region in Japan. As part of his residency, Datta studied the archives of photographer Kudo Shoichi, where the kakumaki, as documented by him, were similar in form to the chador worn in Iran. By using kimonos, haoris, obis and sarees, Datta assimilates, integrates and constantly distorts the principles of garment composition.

Datta’s own sense of style is a statement in conspicuous fluidity—once a regular at fashion weeks in flowy black black attires over long hair left loose and kohl-lined eyes, he has increasingly been moving away from the world of fashion and is the most singular Indian artist who blurs the line between fashion and art. “I’ve always seen myself as a free agent,” Datta says.

Art as resistance

As a student of design, he loved looking at works of the Belgian 6, Martin Margiela and Rei Kawakubo—a group of fashion designers in the 1990s united mostly by origin and common experiences rather than style. The message of resistance is entrenched in this idiom, as is Datta's own: “I’ve been having conversations in the near past with architect-artists, activist-artists and others about the role of aesthetics in resistance. What is normally dismissed as decorative has an intrinsic role to play in resistance movements however big or small. A recent example would be Alaa Salah, the Sudanese architecture student whose image went viral while protesting against Omar al-Bashir’s regime. Salah wore her mother’s thobe which became the visible marker of female protestors in Sudan. In the exhibit at Experimenter, the profusion of tassels, loops and quilting may appear to be decorative but they all contribute to the behaviour of the form,” he says.

Priyanka Raja, who runs Experimenter with Prateek Raja, says, “Although he describes himself as a clothesmaker, it's apparent that Datta’s interests lie far beyond the boundaries of the tangible or at simply considering clothes as a means of clothing but to explore multiplicities in thoughts on sexuality and gender, organism and form, natural and artificial, sustainability and reuse. Through this solo show, he pushes our imagination to consider a new vision of how the body can be viewed through form and material in his sculptures.”

At the intersection of fashion and art

By now, the West is accustomed to seeing fashion and textile-repurposed works in art museums—notably in the fashion galleries at the Victoria & Albert in London and the one at the Metropolitan in New York. The eloquent intersection of fashion and art can be found in the works of designers such as Bill Gibb and Ossie Clark.

This intersection can be seen as progression in design history itself—from the 18th-century fashion, when textiles and surface embellishments were the focal point of fashion through the 19th century when dressmaking and tailoring became increasingly sophisticated, to when iconic works of designers expand the possibilities of fashion and textile, whether conceptually or through innovative techniques. Datta is the most exciting Indian practitioner of this conceptual and structural melding, and Volume 3, Issue 2 is a seminal show in this sense. His pan-Asian aesthetic is a magnificent unifier.

Volume 3 Issue 2 will be on display at Experimenter, Hindustan Road, Kolkata, until 23 September 2022.

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