Experimenter presents Belong, Chanakya School’s first solo exhibition at Experimenter – Colaba, Mumbai, and second solo with the gallery. The exhibition marks four decades of the atelier's collective practice, grounded in the material, philosophical, and mnemonic possibilities of textile. Bringing together expansive textile works and monumental sculptural forms, the exhibition considers belonging not as a fixed condition, but as an ongoing negotiation between body, ecology, memory, and inherited systems of knowledge. Here, belonging is less a question of where one is located than of what one carries: histories held in fibre, gestures transmitted through the hand, and forms of knowledge that persist by being remade.
At the centre of the exhibition is Within, a body of works in which organic cotton and silk threads, glass, and recycled seed beads accumulate into dense, shifting surfaces. Thousands of individually placed elements produce fields that are at once granular and expansive, allowing figures, landscapes, and atmospheric presences to appear and withdraw. The works draw the viewer into a condition of looking towards an interior space where the intimate and the cosmic begin to fold into one another. Within proposes embodiment as a form of enclosure and receptivity: the possibility of being held, and of inhabiting something that exceeds the scale of the individual.
Throughout Belong, the feminine enters not primarily as an iconographic subject but as a generative force. The idea of Prakriti—the primordial, animating force of nature, figured through the divine feminine—provides a conceptual register through which bodies, landscapes, vegetal forms, and cosmic energies become inseparable. In Flowers In Our Forest I, forests, flowers, skies, and sun coalesce into an interconnected field from which mystic female presences emerge through a woven architecture. In this work, nature emerges as a living presence. The human figure is porous to its surroundings, constituted through the same material relations that sustain the ecological realm. This porosity is further articulated in Sun Within II, and in both the works, cotton cord, mohair, jute, and linen are organised through herringbone, basket weave, and chevron structures. Their scale shifts the textile from surface towards environment, the expansiveness of the works thus becoming inseparable from the minute repetitions through which they are made. The monumental is therefore produced through accumulation: countless gestures of the hand becoming structure and spatial presence.
The female figures that inhabit these works draw upon the philosophical and iconographic histories of the Saptamatrikas, the Seven Mothers whose manifestations belong to the larger field of Shakti, the divine feminine force. Yet these figures are not simply returned to as historical symbols. They are reactivated through the conditions of making. Curiosity, insight, nourishment, protection, transformation, resilience, and collective strength become less attributes of represented deities than principles embedded within the labour of the work itself.
This movement from textile process to sculptural form is particularly visible in the body of work Saptamatrika, constructed from coconut, banana, and jute fibres. Braiding, coiling, binding, wrapping, and weaving—gestures conventionally associated with textile—are released from the plane and allowed to occupy volume. The resulting forms inhabit an unstable territory between body, architecture, and organic matter. They suggest that sculpture need not begin with the solid or the monumental; it may emerge instead from acts of joining, gathering, enfolding, and holding. In this transition from surface to volume, Chanakya School’s long engagement with textile becomes an inquiry into what textile might become when it exceeds the limits of cloth.
In Common Ground, raffia fibres move laterally across densely embroidered surfaces before loosening into unfinished edges. These bands operate almost as passages—opening, interrupting, and redirecting the gaze. They evoke cultivated terrains and the ecological histories embedded within textile itself: fields, plants, fibres, extraction, labour. Cloth returns here to the conditions of its own emergence, reminding us that every textile carries an ecosystem within it.
Belong thus locates continuity not in preservation but in transformation. Its forms are neither repetitions of inherited traditions nor departures from them; they are propositions about how knowledge survives through change. The hand becomes a tactile archive, which remembers through touch and transmits by altering what it has received. Across the exhibition, fibre becomes a carrier between generations, between the body and its environment, between image and object, surface and volume. To belong, in Chanakya School’s expansive material vocabulary, is therefore to participate in these continuities—to be woven into relations that precede the individual and will persist beyond it.
