Connect

Entrepreneurship, Business Devt., Innovation, Contemporization, Markets, Marketing, Trade

Connect: People, Place, Imagination

Smith, Nima-Poovaya

Summary Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford has a small but growing collection of historical and contemporary Fine and Decorative Art relating to the Indian subcontinent. The collection includes textiles, exquisite collection of wedding jewelry, glass and metalware as well as works by modern artists. It also has an important collection of Victorian and Edwardian art as well as an extensive collection of contemporary European prints. The creative challenge is how to approach a body of art that reflects not only a shared 500 year history between the Indian subcontinent and Britain but also a significant sub-continental presence in Britain today.

Connect: People, Place & Imagination is a pioneering multi-million pound project involving the revisioning and reinterpreting of the permanent collections of Cartwright Hall which is a cross-cultural, cross-media and across chronologies. Using the intellectual framework of three themes; People, Place and Imagination, the displays will be able to, for the first time, establish a dialogue across cultures that forces us to look at the objects afresh and to think again. Nima's talked on how a transcultural collection is being made into an integral part of British history and contemporary reality.