Swapnaa Tamhane

Swapnaa Tamhane (b. 1976, Toronto) is an artist, curator, and writer based out of Montreal, Canada. Working with drawing and making handmade paper, she addresses the necessity to untether colonial constructs and hierarchies between art, craft, and design by employing a skill-sharing process with artisan-designers in Kutch, Gujarat, India. She works particularly with block printers and a woman's embroidery collective. Tamhane has been exhibited internationally at Sculpture Park Jaipur, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, and the V&A Dundee, Scotland. Currently, Tamhane is an Artist-in-Residence in the department of Fibres & Material Practices, Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montreal.
==Education:==
Tamhane earned a BA in Art History from Carleton University, Ottawa. She earned an MA in Contemporary Art from The University of Manchester, and an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices from Concordia University, Montreal.
Her academic writing has appeared in journals including Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and n.paradoxa.
==Selected Projects:==
===Solo Exhibitions:===
====Mobile Palace, Royal Ontario Museum, 2022====
In 2021, Tamhane exhibited her first solo museum exhibition entitled “Mobile Palace” at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Deepali Dewan, Dan Mishra Senior Curator, Global South Asia. An exhibition catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by Deepali Dewan, Antonia Behan (Queen’s University, Kingston), and Amanda Pinatih (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam).
====The Golden Fibre, V&A Dundee, 2021====
In 2021, Tamhane was commissioned by the V&A Dundee to create an artwork about the jute industry, of which Dundee, Scotland, was a key producer and supplier until the mid-1800s.The Golden Fibre consists of an installation with a collage of archival photographs and drawings of workers as well as microscopic images of jute paper that Tamhane made by hand, as well as mirrors with sandblasted text from a language exercise book made for Scottish mill managers to learn Hindustani. Tamhane’s work, curated by Meredith More and Tiffany Boyle (Mother Tongue), is on display in the Scottish Design Galleries.
===Curated Exhibitions:===
====In Order to Join — The Political in a Historical Moment, 2013====
The exhibition considers the works of artists who are working with conceptual strategies but who do not fall into any one particular medium or movement. The exhibition provides a transcultural art discourse around these particular artists in order to understand each as having similar political responses regardless of their geography. Artists included Angela Grauerholz, Rummana Hussain, Mona Hatoum, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Astrid Klein, Helen Chadwick, Sheela Gowda, Adrian Piper, Rosemarie Trockel, Pushpamala N., Shelagh Keeley, Ana Mendieta, Jamelie Hassan, and Lala Rukh. There is an exhibition catalogue that accompanies this exhibition with writing by Tamhane, Susanne Titz, and Nana Oforiatta-Ayim.
====HERE: Locating Canadian Contemporary Artists, Aga Khan Museum, 2017====
To celebrate Canada’s 150 year anniversary, HERE examined the idea of multiculturalism and the complexities of Canadian identity with a number of artists from various diasporas. Curated by Tamhane, the exhibition featured 23 Canadian artists who work in the country and internationally. The exhibition was inspired by an ancient Roman artifact in the museum’s permanent collection –a stele carved from marble adorned with acanthus leaves on one side and Kufic script on the other. The artifact was originally used as decoration for an ancient Roman structure but was later repurposed to mark the grave of a leather merchant, thus bearing the inscriptions of different cultures and different centuries. Artists included Derya Akay, Sharlene Bamboat, George Elliott Clarke, Sameer Farooq, Brette Gabel, Babak Golkar, Osheen Harruthoonyan, Jamelie Hassan, Sukaina Kubba, Khan Lee, Harkeerat Mangat, Nahed Mansour, Nadia Myre, Dawit L. Petros, Nujalia Quvianaqtuliaq, Dorothea Rockburne, Nep Sidhu, Shaan Syed, Jaret Vadera, Zadie Xa, and Elizabeth Zvonar.
Category:1976 births
Category:Artists
Category:Curators
Category:Carleton University alumni
Category:Concordia University alumni