Textile artist Ritika Skand Vohra remembers the garments passed down from her mother and grandmother.
“I’ve realised I miss some clothes or objects that I feel like I should have preserved over the years rather than just getting rid of them,” she says.
It’s this longing for those discarded salwar kameezzes and saris that drives her latest work, ‘Katran’, which will be presented for Melbourne Fashion Week. Ritika Skand Vohra Katran
Exhibited as part of the ‘Uncertain Endings’ exhibition, ‘Katran’ recycles textile scraps (also known as katran in Hindi) from Indian designer fashion house Antar Agni, reimagining them as the focus of garment creation rather than the waste generated as a result.
The scraps are transformed into embroidered panels which return to Antar Agni to become finished garments, then sent to Vohra in Melbourne for more ‘hand-led interventions’.
A lengthy and primarily hand-crafted process, the work is an invitation to slow down and take stock of what we have.
“We’re so tuned to the Westernised system of getting rid of things that we don’t need quickly…it’s that rush culture we’re so used to that we forget the essence of reusing and repurposing them or the value of these things,” Vohra says.
Central to the process are the SEWA Ruaab artisans, who under Vohra’s guidance, were encouraged to playfully reinvent the katran as embroidered panels, a departure from the briefs and patterns they are used to.
“I was telling them ‘just make anything’, and they’re like ‘what is this make anything? This is like when we ask our family members what to cook today and they’re like, kuch bi bana do’. Do we just make anything?” Vohra says. Ritika Skand Vohra Katran
“[Katran’s] about decentralising or decolonising creativity, which has become so westernised and has a particular aesthetic. I want to break those norms and bring playfulness through imperfections and respect to creativity and [the act of] making.”
Part of this decentralisation is seeing the creative process as ongoing; those who buy any of Vohra’s garments from the exhibition are invited to return it for mending or to add to it themselves, and Vohra will host a workshop ‘Curtains of Co-creation’, inviting anyone to contribute stitches to an ongoing, collectively made transparent curtain. ‘
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Passing through numerous sets of hands, ‘Katran’ centres co-authorship, a community of artisans woven together along the garments’ journey. Ritika Skand Vohra Katran
“It was an interesting metaphor to work with those women artisans who were handling a household and working for extra income, it tied everything together – the collaborators in this whole process are like sort of Kathrans in themselves,” Vohra contemplates.
‘Katran’ is the first work of Vohra’s newly founded Karkhaana Collective, which she hopes will encourage more care and reflection within the fashion industry.
“Karkhaana Collective is a soch, a thought – what happens to design when you try to break these fashion system barriers and there’s no one author,” she says.
“It’s desperate times and we need to slow down and find new ways of collaborating and finding meaning in what we do.”
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