Traces left on art by many hands and minds

Chanakya School's first solo show in India rejects the cult of the solo artist to create space for collective authorship of art

- Somak Ghoshal

(above) 'Dwelling'; and a piece from the 'Field Notes' series.

(PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY CHANAKYA SCHOOL AND EXPERIMENTER)

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.