Nalini B

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will attempt to express trans-generational trauma endured by Tamil Dalit-Christian women through the making of embroidery samplers by a mother-daughter duo. Nalini B is the Coordinator for this project. 

Nalini B aka Nalini Balakumar is a Mysore-based visual artist and photographer. She completed her MDes in Photography Design from the National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar in 2021. Nalini participated in an international exchange programme at the University of the Creative Arts, in Farnham, UK in 2017. She has a Master’s in Mass Communication and Journalism from the University of Mysore in 2016. Nalini has participated in the Chennai Photo Biennale in 2019, and showed her work Why the Tides Ebb and Flow at the Universitas Tarumanagara, Jakarta, Indonesia in 2021. She also won the Toto Award for Photography in 2022. Given her experience, she is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA

The project titled Heirloom Sampler will attempt to find expressions for the trans-generational trauma endured by women in the context of Dalit-Christian inheritance, using embroidery and knitting - skills that women artists have historically used as tools for political and feminist resistance. The Project Coordinator will make the embroidery pieces as folktales, in collaboration with her mother, Vanitha. The motivation is to illustrate the history of their family while locating it within the larger history of Dalit-Christians in their native region of Kongunad in Tamil Nadu. The project involves research travel to Coimbatore, Pollachi, and Madukarai, to record oral history, make images, experiment with dyeing on fabrics and cyanotypes, to create the embroidery samplers. The project will draw inspiration from the book Karukku by Bama (the pen-name of a Tamil Dalit woman from a Roman Catholic family) and the Project Coordinator’s grandmother’s textile journals and notebooks. 

The outcomes of the project will be a compilation of oral histories, sketches leading to experiments with fabric dyeing and cyanotypes, and the embroidery samplers. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be photographs and audio-visual documentation of the research travels, and soft copies of the preliminary sketches, dyed fabrics, cyanotypes, and embroidery samplers. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to mobilise feminist artistic tools of textiles and embroidery that have been used by canonical artists like Faith Ringgold, to address the specific socio-emotional context of women’s experiences among South Indian Dalit-Christians. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.