There Is More At Stake Than Just 5 Metres of Cloth: screenprint on silk and cotton, Raju Rage

This screenprinted saree is both a question and conversation about contemporary queer South Asian identity in the diaspora and how it relates to erased herstories around the politics of cloth, colonialism and associated migrant labour. The 5 metres of cloth contains a printed collage of images of the artists grandmother, a forgotton Panjabi dialect, archived newspaper headines and photographs of migration, drawn sketches and a colonial map. What narratives and memories do we carry and wear in the contemporary diaspora?

*prints for sale 60 x 80cm, £40
[This piece of cloth is made of 100% undyed Cotton. It is neither seamed or stitched in order to highlight the raw material used in producing printed textiles, as well as the labour and process involved. The frayed edges and loose threads that connect the material together speak to the connected threads of memory and herstories of migration. Whilst the unravelling of the threads also responds to the forgetting of them. The unfinished quality is primarily aesthetic, to allow change but to also encourage an intimate relationship with the textile as it ages with environment. It is heat protected and waterproofed and can be framed or stitch seamed to protect it further. Each print, despite being a repeated screen-print, is still unique and will adapt to whatever setting you expose it to, whether you wash it, stretch it, frame it, cover it, expose it to heat or sunlight e.t.c. The artist, has left it unsigned to acknowledge that many textile labourers are/were not acknowledged for their work or art/craft. The cost of the printed textile corresponds to the labour and materials used to produce it. It is left for the owner of this print to pass on the legacy and story from where it originates, which is symbolic of the forgotten narratives of our own lives.]