Down to earth

Ceramists and studio potters from all over the world come together to celebrate the humble kulhar.

Did you ever think, when you unthinkingly chucked the little kulhar in which you’d just finished having tea that that humble, basic earthenware teacup was really a work of art? If the thought never occured to you, then you should perhaps troop down to the capital’s Crafts Museum to see “1001 Cups”, an exhibition of…yes, 1001 cups made by 100 ceramic artists and studio potters from 19 countries, all of them inspired by the simple kulhar.

For the kulhar is not just a kulhar — each cup, writes Oceane Madelaine, one of the contributing ceramists, in her note in the exhibition brochure, “not only contains tea, but also its own history, a culture, a landscape, a purpose, the imprint of the hands that shaped it…To hold one of these cups between one’s palms, to contemplate it, is to be overwhelmed by the strength, the individuality contained in it.”

To be sure, many of the exhibits at 1001 Cups are free “interpretations” of the kulhar’s simplicity. You’ll have to look very hard to find traces of the kulhar in Tine Deweerdt’s (Belgian) craggy, coral reef-like structures, or in Futamura Yoshimi’s (France) jagged, coconut-shaped cups, or in Yangze Jian’s (China) perforated goblets, with industrial screws running through the holes.

“Initiated” and “presented” by Prohelvetia, the Swiss Art Council and curated by the Swiss ceramist and teacher Claude Presset, 1001 Cups is an itinerant show that will travel to the Guangdong Museum of Art in China and the Icheon World Ceramic Exposition in Korea next year and from there to various venues in France and Switzerland.

The show brings together a range of ceramic production processes — from the rudimentary methods of the humble kulhar-makers in India to sophisticated techniques developed by studio potters in workshops and applied in art institutes across the world.

There’s also a variety of textures, colours and ornamentation on show — from the delicate, but crude patterns in white and brown by the Kutchhi potter Saraben Kumbhar, to the elaborate reptiles and birds that Frenchwoman Simone Perrotte, a bright young star in the European ceramic world, etches in black on her white china cups.

The kulhar — in its essence as a container, the handle-less cup — is fairly universal, found from time immemorial in some form or the other in most countries and civilisations. So while the show doffs its hat at the various avant garde “reinterpretations” and “experimentations” of the kulhar, the more interesting are the specimens by indigenous artists-modern artists working at the cusp of contemporary art practice and traditional craft methods.

Presset, who has researched the ethnography of traditional ceramics all over the world, includes the works of little-known (in India, at least) artists such as Akbar Rakhimov, who’s trying to revive the ancient “ishkor” blue glazing of Uzbekistan. There’s also, in this category, Sheherazade Alam, the acclaimed Pakistani ceramist who is, among other things, giving new life to the ancient pottery of Harappa; and a few specimens of the work of the Istalifi potters of Aghanistan, an art being revived by the NGO, Turquoise Mountain Foundation.

The history of ceramics and its proliferation is the history of trade along the Silk Route, going back to the ninth century when Europe awoke to the wonders of Chinese porcelain, an encounter that led to the development of new techniques by local potters. The packing crates in which the cups are displayed, thus, become an apt metaphor for this itinerant history.