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Fifty years of documenting Sindh’s visual history has culminated in a new project for Nasreen and Hasan Askari
Nasreen Askari had no interest in fashion when she was growing up. “I was deeply ugly, slightly sporty and slightly nerdy. That summed me up,” she says of an adolescence spent in the elite schools of 1960s Karachi. But if Askari, now nearing 70 and elegantly draped in Issey Miyake pleats, has anything to do with it, then the traditional textiles from her home province of Sindh will be appreciated not just as quirky national heritage but as art in their own right.
“Even now the antiquity of Sindh’s textiles tradition, which goes back to 5000BC, is terribly under- exposed and not studied,” she says. “It has been subsumed under a generic classification of Indian art and culture if it is appreciated at all.” Continue reading...