Kallol Datta left fashion at the altar of research a long time ago. The result was someone who is roused not by trends-dictated sartorial cuts and tailoring but by the politics of it. Backed by aggressive research, his creations trespass into the world of art and can be easily called works of art, and Datta, a storyteller, collector, researcher, historian, artist, and of course, clothes maker, a word that he identifies with the most.
Datta’s pull towards the clothing practices of East — Southeast Asia, the Korean peninsula and Japan along with North Africa and the Indian subcontinent — and lived experience in the Middle East, shaped his work. Through materials collected via donations and drives, he constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs. His pieces travel in time and preserve time.
Calcutta has witnessed Datta’s oeuvre in the past with solo shows at Experimenter, and though the city will be missing his new body of work, Mumbai will gain and experience his provocative ‘Volume IV: Truths, Half-Truths, Half-Lies, Lies’. Datta’s exhibits will be on display at Experimenter Colaba, from July 10 to August 20, and offer something new and different from his Volumes showcased earlier. In a freewheeling chat with t20S, Datta, who was part of the prestigious State of Fashion Biennale 2024, talks about diving deep into the socio-political warps and wefts of clothes, his process and more.
Truths,
Half-Truths,
Half-Lies, Lies
I think this is the first time that there are certain elements or sub-themes to any of my projects. It’s also because there’s so much information in the works themselves. As viewers and observers, when you’re seeing the works, you’ll also get some sense of access to the research I’ve been conducting. ‘Volume IV’ is me sharing my research and trying to reimagine past histories in today’s day and time. So I hope that’s what people take away from it.
A collaborative process
A lot of times, when I’m working on a show not happening in the same continent, the curator and I get on video calls. I remember I had a solo in Japan, and I was in India, and we installed the entire show over video calls. But let’s say in this case, with the show which will be happening at Experimenter Colaba in Mumbai, it has been a very collaborative exercise of trying to figure out how the works are installed, and what the flow is, and all of that.
Looking East
I think I just naturally gravitated towards East because the regions of my interest have something in common. They all share some kind of colonial history, colonial past, or trade, migration, all of that. Let’s say the Haori in Japan, or the Hanbok in Korea, and the Angrakha in the subcontinent, to the Kapitan in Persia. There are certain similarities which come about. There’s been a lot of studying into sanctuary laws, religious edicts and imperial edicts of the past. And what really connects all the regions of my interest is, if I’m reading something about a certain kind of law or sanctuary law, which was, let’s say, in the 16th century in the Korean peninsula, that would sound like you’re reading a contemporary piece of text in any of the regions. That is because things still haven’t changed that much, and things still haven’t improved that much for the minorities in all these regions. After all, these laws were being set in place by dominant majorities, dominant factions. And nothing has changed. How they expected women to behave in the 17th century, 18th century, they still expect women to behave like that.
From fashion
to art
My clothes-making practice has always been research-led. However, when I started it around 2011, I wasn’t getting enough time to conduct research, analyse, and collate data, which is why I made the transition into the visual arts and the contemporary arts. I also grew up in West Asia in regions like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and I think it becomes very easy for me to figure out that clothing has always been political. Because what you wear makes an immediate mark on your community. We all think there is some amount of free choice or free will in what we wear today, but a lot of it has been predetermined for us by religious scriptures, religious writings and commonplace laws. I thought it would be easier for me to articulate my research and produce it in the art space, which is why I made the transition.
Clothes collector
Since 2020, when I transitioned to the art space, I’ve been working with donated items of clothing from a particular institution, or even independently, holding clothing drives across different countries. The donors have been incredibly generous with their donations. I mostly collect native-wear clothing from that region, from a certain time period, like the late Shoah period, 1945 to 1989. So, every work I produce is through donated items. If it’s textile, it’s made with donated items of clothing; if it’s metal work, then it’s always with recycled metal or reclaimed metal.
Politics of clothes
Every single work in the exhibition starts off from a grid-based construction. Even the Jeogori, a gender-neutral garment, which was basically the upper part of the blouse of a garment, has evolved from the 17th to the 20th century. For women, it kept getting shorter and shorter, until it became so short that you couldn’t have a public life any more. You were sequestered, and you were forced to wear a chest binding or a breast binding cloth and then wear the Jeogiri. Whereas for men, it became like an innerwear. They wore it underneath their outerwear jackets or overlays. That’s how clothing becomes political. Clothing was used as a tool of subjugation and intimidation. There is a suite of 18 Jeogoris in this show, and all 18 have been made to the exact dimensions of what was excavated and which are in museum collections in Korea right now.
There are so many coded things in these garments. For instance, the outer breast ties, if they were purple, meant that the person who was wearing them was able to produce a male son or male heir for the family. Again, if you belonged to a very powerful clan of that time, you were the only one who had access to a certain kind of textiles for your Jeogori. So everything was really coded that way.
Artist or clothes maker?
I still identify myself as a clothes maker/ researcher, only because I spend more time conducting research. If I’m doing framed works, which are two-dimensional, I still use the principles of clothes making to approach the building of that work.
What’s next?
A lot of the research I get is actually from archival material. So the next that I’m researching into is the media. There was a lot of research conducted on advertising posters in Japan in the Meiji, Taisho, and Shoah periods. Next, I think I’ll be looking into Japanese newspapers as Japan had colonised Korea in the early 1900s. So the newspaper of that time was printed in Korea. So I’m basically accessing the archives and going through those at the moment.
Also, there is something in the pipeline in terms of documenting all my research. I’ll only be able to talk about it more when it’s fleshed out and when things are more concrete.