Kallol Datta is a clothes maker and researcher. A cornerstone of their work is extensive creative research in clothing practices, native to South West Asia, North Africa, the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Their practice reflects upon reconstructing, repurposing, and restructuring donated items of clothing that hold memory, episodic events, and history, to negotiate larger questions about work and production, of labour and use, cultural sustainability, and of ideas revolving around research as production. Datta describes their works as ‘sites of tension’, intimate portraits and landscapes.
The curatorial projects Datta has undertaken have been informed by their practice and foreground care as a connective thread and principle. Their artistic and curatorial projects are driven by community, acts of resistance against structural inequalities, shared processes of healing, and radical ways of knowledge building.
They had solos Random Access (2017) and Volume 3 Issue 2 (2022) at Experimenter, Kolkata, and has been part of residencies at KHOJ International Artists Association, New Delhi and T.A.J. Residency and SKE projects, Bengaluru. Kallol was awarded the Arts Network Asia Grant in 2019, a finalist of the Jameel Prize in 2021 and one of the winners of the TAF London Emerging Artist Awards in 2022. They have exhibited at TRI, Kolkata, Aomori Contemporary Art Centre; Aomori, Beirut Design Fair, Centro Cultural La Moneda; Santiago, India Art Fair; New Delhi, Museo Franklin Rawson; San Juan, National Museums Scotland; Edinburgh, Nomad Monaco and Victoria and Albert Museum; London. They were part of the group exhibition Ties that Bind at the State of Fashion Biennale 2024, Arnhem. Kallol was the curator of the inaugural edition of Kolkata Queer Arts Month 2023 and was the interlocutor at the State of Fashion Biennale 2024, Arnhem, 2024.