Textiles and Artisans with Daan van Dartel, Lipika Bansal, and Kirit Chitara

This episode features a conversation hosted by Aarti Kawlra, the Academic Director of the Humanities Across Borders program here at IIAS, in which she speaks with three guests: Daan van Dartel, Curator of Popular Culture and Fashion at the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands; Lipika Bansal, a researcher, social designer, and the founder of Textiel Factorij in Amsterdam; and, finally, Kirit Chitara, an artist based in India. In September 2022, IIAS and Humanities Across Borders hosted an In Situ Graduate School entitled Textiles and Dyes as Transnational, Global Knowledge. As Aarti and others collaborated on this event with various textile-related institutions, she met this group and heard the story of Kirit, who had previously found the artwork of his grandfather hanging in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. This raised all sorts of perennial questions about power in the production and display of art, and in this conversation, the groups discusses such issues of provenance and attribution, of curation and collaboration.