There are two ways to pass on the pattern of a shawl. You can hand someone the finished cloth. Or you can give a weaver the instructions for making it again. Kashmiri architects Owais Asif Khan and Samreen Junaid Wani began with that second possibility when they designed Taleem for Dubai Design Week. In place of yarn they had a supply of used beams and planks. The people encountering the pattern would be able to walk inside it.
The architects work together in Dubai as VARUSSI. Even the name has a material history: in Kashmiri it refers to a timber partition. Their contribution to In Other Words, the five-practice Abwab exhibition at Dubai Design District from 3 to 8 November, brought that architectural inheritance together with a different kind of workshop knowledge.
What the weaver knows
In Kashmiri carpet and Kani shawl making, taleem is a system of notation shared by the person devising a pattern and the person weaving it. It gives the maker a sequence to follow. A completed textile lets us see where a colour or shape returns. The notation holds something harder to see once the piece is finished: the order of work that put the repeat there.
The architects took that distinction seriously. In the design view, a long horizontal beam cuts across the frame. Above it a series of diagonals makes a rhythm that the eye can follow from bay to bay. Below, upright members and their shadows make a second pattern. A person moving past the frame would see different pieces line up at each step. Repetition, usually read across the face of a textile, has acquired depth.
After the last visitor
Faham supported the installation with material, and the wood was sourced, fabricated and assembled in the UAE. Reclaimed timber had already done one job before it entered the exhibition. The more interesting decision concerned its third use. VARUSSI designed the structure in modules that could come apart and go back together. A beam recovered intact carries forward the work already spent choosing it, sizing it and fitting it to its neighbours.
The exhibition closed on 8 November. The organisers describe how the structure can be reassembled, although their project account gives no subsequent site or measured quantity of waste avoided. For anyone commissioning a temporary stand, the practical question survives the show. When dismantling begins, who will have the pieces, and who will know the order in which they fit?
Elsewhere in the same exhibition, Kanaka Raghavan separated Devanagari letterforms across translucent, block-printed textiles. Move around the layers and parts of a letter drift apart or fall into alignment. It makes a revealing companion to Taleem. Raghavan used cloth to ask how we recognise a written sign. VARUSSI used a weaver’s signs to ask how we might build something a second pair of hands can put together again.
Lead design image courtesy of Faham. Explore the project notes and the Abwab exhibition at Dubai Design Week.
