An exhibition curated by Alice Cicolini in 2004 in her role as Head of Arts at the British Council India.
In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, we are all “cultural commuters”, ‘chutney’ hybrids in an increasingly sophisticated play with identity. A potent mix of global branding, migration, international travel and high speed communications technology is facilitating an ever greater and more complex understanding of national cultures once considered distant, one dimensional and exotic.
Global Local address the impact of this immediacy on a group of designers based both in India and in the UK. The work explores their differing understandings of the way in which cultural sensitivities can be expressed through material objects, finding new spaces between stereotype and a total disengagement with place and identity.
The results convey some sense of the degree to which national identity is fluid and personal. The designer’s understanding of identity may be rooted in either materials, processes, form or aesthetic, but ultimately the power of these objects as cultural signifiers rests in the emotional responses they elicit from the individual consumer. If they in any way encapsulate a contemporary national identity, it is in the hands and homes of those who purchase.