Mila Lanfermeijer
Work Information

Simultanious Faces (in collaboration with Kirit Chitara), 2023

Natural dye kalamkari on cotton, acrylic paint, silk dye, photoprint on organic cotton, silk dye on stiffened silk, wood.

Kirit Chitara’s religious motifs and Mila Lanfermeijer’s collection short stories and snap shots form the basis for a series of large scale works that settle somewhere between painting and sculpture. Kirit is a devotee of the divine feminine. He creates intricate paintings on textiles that serve as portable shrines to a variety of goddesses. One way to tell the goddesses apart is through the animals that accompany them, their weapons and accessoires. When people of the nomadic Vaghari community were barred from entering temples, they made their own shrines with depictions of the Mother Goddess on cloth.

The technique of kalamkari has a strong historical connection to the Netherlands. It was used to create Chintz, a floral motif cotton, originally imported by the VOC from India and part of Dutch folk costume (klederdracht).

This work was shown as part of the exhibition First Impressions with works by Jacob Dwyer, Halla Einarsdóttir, Jakob Forster, Helen Frik, Alex Storey Gordon, Hans Hovy, Jamie Kane, Bernd Krauss, Rhett Leinster, Anna Luczak, Ana Navas, Micha Patiniott, Josie Perry, Petter Dahlström Persson, Daphne Simons, Jesse Strikwerda, Riette Wanders & Lorenza Wistuba.

‘This exhibition started with a welcome invitation to a group of artists we feel close to and whose work we feel a great affinity with. We received costumes for absent sculptures, voluptuous stone carvings, a well meaning felted flasher, the story of an unseen character in a New Orleans swamp, the history of a nun with a self healing jaw. Traces, imprints and impressions started to draw the outlines of bodies and characters.’

Photography by Franzi Mueller Schmidt

Simultanious Faces