Roopantar

When we opened the 47-A Gallery in 2023, we presented a Mata Ni Pachhedi, the sacred cloth used for worship by the Waghri tribe in Gujarat, as our inspiration for design. As the community was allowed into temples they created their own sacred spaces, using cloth painted with images of the goddess, as a backdrop to their acts of worship.

The cloth of the mother goddess (mata-ni-pachhedi) was created by artists from the Chitara community, each one representing the particular avatar of the mother goddess they needed to invoke on the day. This arrangement - of a painted cloth substituting or a temple - was what, to us, best defined good design : the optimum solution to a problem.

In this lay the germ of a show we wanted to do; to understand the traditions around the Mata ni Pachhedi, and the complex rituals of worship involving members of this low caste tribe “becoming” the Mata and being worshiped by all castes. This transformation was what intrigued us, and what we wanted Arthur Duff, a designer deeply rooted in Ahmed-abad, to explore.