Grantha

Grantha is a word derived from Sanskrit, one of the oldest known words for a book. Its age is not just a measure of time, but foremost a measure of cultural continuity, while its meaningfulness results from direct experience of the complexity of communication right at its origins, far from coincidence. In addition to book, grantha also means manuscript, things tied together, knot or composition. This pre-word expresses more than the name of an object, it speaks of how physically manipulating fragments bind the parts together and a message is created that resists time beyond the scale of an individual life.


The artworks of these four artists, representing different generations and geographies, engage in a dialogue with each other concerning this first gesture of tying threads and fragments together. Each work is a kind of unique manuscript, in which it is not the paint, but the very fibers and threads weaved by hand or stitched on a sewing machine with different voices together in a story of sensibility toward matter, discontinuity and the enigma of the layers of time.