ARTIST STATEMENT
In Oct 2020 farmers from Punjab, India, began a protest to repeal three unjust farm laws that risked increasing the privatization of and a stranglehold on the food supplies. Staging one of the largest and longest protests in history, Indian farmers across the globe joined the protest in solidarity. The year-long protest in India ended in November 2021, when Prime Minister Narinder Modi rescinded the anti-farm laws. The protest had resulted in the deaths of 726 farmers from violence, illness, and inclement weather. Combing slow stitching, quilting, hand and machine embroidery, natural dying with tannins, oxides and rust printing is a methodology to engage in the contradictions of care, connection and cultural memory of the 2020 Indian framers protest. I embellish overseen spaces, embroidering the names of farmers who lost their lives in this protest to engage the viewer to slow down and question resistance movements and labor of the global south.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Savneet Tawar is a Chicago based American Studies scholar, fiber artist, educator and art therapist. She is currently a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the art therapy and fiber and material studies departments. As an interdisciplinary fiber and feminist artist, her work exists at the intersection of archives, memory, language, feminists politics and questions of resistance. She is interested in the contradictions of feminist labor and archival matters to explore history and memory that questions– what and who is worthy of being a subject of discourse? What colonial narratives and images continue to define matters of the global south?
© Savneet Talwar