Tara: Giving old materials another life

In Mumbai’s Khotachiwadi, where old Portuguese-style homes have been adapted and altered across generations, the idea of making something new from what already exists feels particularly apt. At 47-A, Ka-Sha’s Tara brings that question into the gallery, assembling garments, textile remnants, beads, buttons, wires and other fragments into a presentation shaped by reuse, reconstruction, and participation.

What happens when we stop treating an object's previous life as an obstacle to its next one?

At the centre of the exhibition is Heart to Haat, Ka-Sha’s response to production waste. The initiative began with a relatively simple proposition: materials that have already had a life can have another one. A discarded garment might become an accessory. A fragment of embroidery might find its way into a new object. A collection of buttons or beads, separated from its original purpose, can become the starting point for something else.

For Karishma, curator of Tara and founder of Ka-Sha, the emotional history of these materials can matter as much as their physical qualities. “When someone brings us a garment, we first try to understand the emotion attached to it and what they want to preserve,” she says. Sometimes that means retaining the fabric; in other cases, it might be an embroidered detail or the memory of the person who once wore it. The studio has received garments belonging to family members who have died, brought in with the hope that they might be transformed into something the family can continue to use.

That emphasis on personal history extends into the exhibition’s most participatory element, the Maker’s Table. Visitors are given fabrics, remnants, beads and buttons and invited to make something themselves, whether a brooch, bracelet, garment or an object without a defined purpose. The table deliberately leaves room for experimentation. “Once something is made available to someone else, it can take on a completely new meaning,” Karishma says. “For us, that’s where our authorship ends and the visitor’s begins.”

Srila Chatterjee, co-founder of 47-A, describes reuse and repurposing as philosophies that run through the work at Baro Market. Tara therefore asks a practical question with larger implications: what happens when we stop treating an object's previous life as an obstacle to its next one? Here, the answer is found through handling, cutting, joining and making, with the final form left open to whoever comes through the door.

Until 8 November 2026, from 11 am – 7 pm (Mondays closed)

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