In Chanakya School's first solo show in India, many hands come together to create each work of art

In the middle of a room at Experimenter gallery in Kolkata’s Ballygunge Place stands a large sculptural installation called Dwelling (2025). Made of three human-sized structures, it is blood-red in colour and arranged in a circle. These figures with floating hair, or so they seem from a distance, are bent over. They have tentacles wriggling out of their legs to create a tangled mess of ropes on the floor. Created by the members of the Mumbai-based not-for-profit institution Chanakya School of Craft, under the guidance of their artistic director Karishma Swali, this spectacular piece is part of Trace, the collective’s first solo show in India.

“This work was inspired by the bhunga houses in Gujarat’s Kutch region,” Swali says on a video call. “Around 12 people worked on it, using open-weave techniques and making hand-twisted chords.” The idea, she adds, is to convey a sense of joyful spaces and safe structures. But, with their Medusa-like heads, the three twisty figures, like the three witches in Macbeth, exude a hint of menace, too. Something about the confidence with which they sprawl over the floor quietly signals power and authority. Perhaps fittingly so.

“Traditionally, women’s role (in weaver communities) has been restricted to preparing the loom and the shuttle,” Swali says. To counter this history of neglect, Chanakya School invented “the shuttle wrap” technique, giving its women members the agency to defy social norms. Instead of just wrapping cotton on a loom, they actively contribute to the alchemy that brings a piece like Dwelling to life.

“Typically a work begins with obsessive research, followed by a sketch I make,” Swali says. “It isn’t a rigorous instruction manual, just a guiding framework.” Once the concept is in place, artisans begin to apply different embroidery techniques to create 7-11 layers on each piece of work, using thread, beads and yarn, on materials like cloth, canvas, bamboo frames, and even figurines carved out of blackstone. The process is intuitive and experiential, collaborative but also deeply personal.

“Each layer gives you an idea of what to do next,” Swali says. “At some point you feel the work is ready.” Every member of Chanakya School leaves their unique imprint—the “trace” that the title of the show refers to—on each piece and, instead of a single creator, the ownership of the work resides with the collective. In this egalitarian model of creation, any income generated from sales is invested back into the school.

Thus the collective speaks in one voice, literally captured by phrases inscribed on the walls of the gallery. These are lines that were spoken by individuals while at work, but the sentiments are universal. “Making is a form of remembering,” says one. “Main khud ko isme pehchanti hun,” (“I recognise myself in it”) adds a woman. “Here the past is alive too,” goes a third.

Some of India’s most successful artists, whose work sells for staggering sums of money, employ a fleet of workers to bring their vision into reality. But the final outcome is signed by one person, and all the wealth and prestige accrued from it belong to this individual.

Chanakya School rejects this misleading cult of the solo artist by anonymising the maker, even as the name of every team member is acknowledged on a wall of the gallery. “I grew up with this collectivist approach to making art under my father’s guidance,” Swali says. “It has never not felt natural to me.”

In 1984, Vinod Shah founded Chanakya International, now famous for working with international haute couture labels like Dior, to revive and preserve India’s textile heritage. Swali, his daughter, who heads it now, launched the educational wing in 2016. In the last 10 years, Chanakya School has produced over 1,000 graduates and taught them 300-odd embroidery techniques. The sheer dexterity of their craftsmanship is evident in each work on display at Trace, especially in the gigantic triptych that covers one whole wall. But that’s not all. There is play involved in the process, too.

If you look hard, you will notice that the flowers on the face and limbs of the blackstone figures are echoed in some of the works on canvas. In the Flowers in the Night series, the allusion is direct, but that doesn’t mean you can skim over it. The eye is instead drawn to the intricate bead-work as you move closer to the work.

If uneven stitches add texture and tactility to the foreground of a work, the same piece looks magically seamless from behind. It’s hard to believe, for instance, that Flowers in Our Forest and Opening Sky (both of which are hung from ceiling to floor) have multiple layers woven on one side, which gives off the impression of valleys and ridges, but as you walk around it, you find the entire structure held by a flat background. No less intriguing is the fact that these massive works were woven horizontally, involving close coordination between multiple hands, though imagined and finished as vertical pieces.

Between abstract forms, cartographic imagery and natural landscapes, Trace offers a feast of optical delights and illusions. Like Swali’s sketches, it asks the viewer to indulge in their own act of interpretation—to stitch stories only they can see in their mind’s eye. On the upper deck of the gallery, a series of small-format works, titled Field Notes, widens this space for reflection as forms and shapes emerge on textiles, woven with cotton threads. One looks like a human heart, pulsating and red. Or maybe it is a map to somewhere you’ve never been, a place where only the finest art can take you.

At Experimenter, Ballygunge Place, Kolkata, till 21 March.