Between tradition and modernity

Furniture design in India is caught in a time warp. Despite all the many "designer" ateliers and boutiques that have come up lately, most of what you see are variations of the same old shapes that go back...probably to the time the British first brought in Western living concepts to the country.

Few have attempted to break the mould and come up with designs that go with and reflect contemporary sensibilities.

Rajiv Saini tries with "The Experience of Transition", an exhibition at the Otto Zoo gallery in Milan which ended this Wednesday and whose timing was meant to coincide with the Salone Internatoionale De Mobile, the world's premier furniture design fair that's held every year in the Italian city.

Mumbai-based Saini is a well-known name in architecture and design circles, highly sought after and feted within and outside India for his synthesis of the traditional Indian and the contemporary international, his most famous project being the exquisite Devi Garh palace hotel in Udaipur.

Designer art

Tables, desks, stools, bookcases "" Saini starts with utilitarian forms. "Then," as Peter Nagy says, "he brings in surfboards, boomerangs, whirligigs, diving-boards, light aircraft, turbine engines, and references to both India's historical monuments and its pulsating cities."

Look at L-O-C (pix) which Saini first showed in end-2006 at Art Spaces gallery in Miami, where Saini juxtaposes the timber of the table-top with bronze sculpted in a vaguely organic shape.

Or the table in rough iron, with what looks like the outline of a city welded on its underbelly, bullet holes on its sides and a delicate butterfly perched on one edge. "It's the one chimera of hope that we have in all the bleakness," Saini says.

Saini uses a wide range of materials: inlaid wood, resin, steel, bronze, moulding them into liquid forms. Look at the work table below in pink resin, placed on an industrial looking plinth. Does it work as a piece of furniture or is it a sculpture?