THISS Studio | Jhuley Lal

Jhuley Lal

Year
2024
Type
Exhibition
Status
Complete
Location
Karachi / London

THISS Studio and Numaish Karachi in partnership with the British Council introduce ‘Jhuley Lal: Crafting the Contemporary’ at the 2024 London Design Festival.

The project is a celebration of Sindhi craft and an experiment in international collaboration between the UK and Pakistan. The exhibition showcases the outcome of three curated residencies that took place between November 2023 and February 2024. A parallel exhibition took place in Karachi’s Mohatta Palace between May and August 2024.

The residencies allowed the artists and designers to develop a collaborative purpose. They learned from artisans’ generationally developed skills and worked with them to propose new design outcomes for traditional craft processes, which have rarely ventured beyond the limitations of a known product. The residencies afforded a temporarily shared context in the crafts villages where materials are grown, extracted and processed. The resulting works bring together contemporary aesthetic and traditional methods in a vibrant tapestry of artistry.

While moving people and ideas between the UK and Pakistan resulted in fruitful collaborative design, bringing the artworks and exhibition to London proved to be a nearly insurmountable obstacle. The process involved friction at every level. Each artwork produced through thoughtful collaboration, was reduced to rote descriptors and listed on paperwork.

In the end, the very friction produced by movement has forced all parties to repeatedly, and with great effort, acknowledge the value of craft.

Special thanks to all artists and collaborators involved:

Artists