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 Pakistani province of Sindh has a rich history of artisanal craft. Entire villages engage in the production of specific objects, from raw material harvesting and processing to refining and finishing. Craft forms communities and provides an economic relationship between these communities and the wider country. The long-term viability of these craft villages is under threat, due in part to contemporary taste in Pakistan driving public consumption away from commissioned craft pieces and towards ready-made and mass-produced objects. With no other market to access, villages with a specific craft focus are deprived of their historic purpose. The 2022 floods in Pakistan exacerbated this condition, causing widespread damage that impacted millions.

This project, initiated by Numaish Karachi and THISS Studio and supported by the British Council, was conceived as a strategic intervention. It sought to bring together emergent artists and designers from Pakistan and the UK with artisanal communities in Khairpur, Shikarpur and Karachi. Following an open call, a jury selected artists and designers with a range of experience and research agendas. The participants were placed in groups with artisans to create open, engaged and productive dialogue between people with very different lived experience.

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.

Jhuley Lal, the patron saint of travellers, is one of the oldest deities associated with vegetation and water. His message of courage and peace is a unifying force for both Islam and Hinduism. This exhibition aligns with our namesake to explore the creative potential of the distinctive crafts of Sindh when ideas are encouraged to wander and migrate across continents. While moving people and ideas between the UK and Pakistan resulted in fruitful collaborative design, bringing the artworks and exhibition to London has proven to be a nearly insurmountable obstacle. The process involved friction at every level. Each artwork you see here, produced through thoughtful collaboration, was reduced to rote descriptors and listed on paperwork. Assemblies of carved wood with jute panels. Rosewood vessel with inlays along with support pieces from carved rosewood. Mango wood disks, painted with ornamentation in acrylic paint. In the end, the very friction produced by movement has forced all parties to repeatedly, and with great effort, acknowledge the value of craft.