Globally Connected @ FIT: Confluence of Tradition and Modernity in Textile Art

Join Sunaina Bhalla for a fascinating exploration of how traditional textile techniques blend with modern artistic expressions.

Sunaina Bhalla is a contemporary artist of Indian origin, living in Singapore. Educated in India, she moved to Tokyo in the late ’90s and has spent the last two decades in various parts of North and South Asia. Having completed her formal education as a textile designer specializing in print, she chose to pursue an immersive education in the traditional art form of Nihonga in Japan, where she spent five years studying under Suiko Ohta-sensei of the Kyoshin-Do school. Bhalla completed her Masters of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths University, London, and Lasalle College of the Arts, where her thesis topic was “The Gesture and the Ritual of Pain.”

Her work revolves around the repetitive and ritualistic nature of gestures and their traces. She explores the transformative effects of the deliberate infliction of pain on the human body during the curative process of alleviating disease and decay. By using industrial materials analogous to the fragile nature of the body, juxtaposed with fabric and embroidery, she examines the passage of time and the mark-making that documents this process. Bhalla is currently researching traditional healing practices in Singapore and South East Asia that employ natural remedies like herbs in chronic health conditions.

Globally Connected @ FIT is hosted by the Office of International Programs, History of Art, and the Cultural Fellows.

This virtual event is free and open to the public; REGISTER HERE.