With:
Canna Patel
Rajiv Saini
Samira Rathod
Shilpa Gore-Shah
Pinkish Shah
Lotus Design Services
Young Indian interior designers use steel, stone, glass, wood, plastic and silk fabrics when creating homes and offices, bars and restaurants, hotels and shops. They combine high tech with craft artistry, Indian tradition with a modern, international lifestyle; they create spaces that unfold sensual qualities that go well beyond any Bollywood clichés.
The exhibition presents examples of this in the form of work by Canna Patel and Parul Zaveri/Nimish Patel from Ahmedabad, Samira Rathod, Rajiv Saini and Shilpa Gore-Shah/Pinkish Shah from Mumbai and Lotus Design Services from New Delhi.
Architect Canna Patel is a powerful figure in Indian interior design – not just through her buildings for private and business customers, but also because she passes on theory through her academic teaching. Like Parul Zaveri and Nimish Patel she is a college lecturer, committed to bringing on the younger generation in the design trade. Zaveri and Patel are an architect-couple who do not just devote themselves to interior design for buildings, but are also involved in revitalizing historical urban quarters and in new uses for old building stock. Their architecture practice was already responding to questions about economical energy use in the 1980s with its concepts for using alternative technologies.
Shilpa Gore-Shah, Pinkish Shah and Samira Rathod represent contemporary Mumbai, and have won many awards for their bar, office and private house designs. Rajiv Sani is also from Mumbai. His work appeals because of its elegant forms and his choice of exquisite materials. Like Lotus Design Services, he is one of the younger generation of Indian designers. While the founders of Lotus feature in the exhibition mainly with shop designs, Saini reveals glimpses of the luxurious world of private living.
The National Institute of Design is showing bamboo furniture, contemporary and well designed, in the exhibition. The Indian Institute of Interior Designers promotes model solutions for housing, work and living, publishing in “INSITE” magazine, for example. Indian interior design covers an enormous range – minimalistic and reticent or ornamental and magnificently colourful.
Curated by Iris Lenz.
