Vikrant Bhise’s new body of work features portraits of Dalit Panther and Black Panther founders, along with everyday objects and libraries that anchored their movements. Namdeo Dhasal, Raja Dhale, and J.V. Pawar—founders of the Dalit Panthers—are portrayed along their writings: Dhasal’s first poetry collection Golpitha, addressing caste oppression in Mumbai while also evoking the city’s labouring classes and red-light districts; Dhale’s published works and magazine Dhammalipi; and Pawar’s association with Mahaparinirvan Diwas on December 6 (which commemorates the death anniversary of Babasaheb Ambedkar), when he sold books at Dadar Chowpatty beach to spread Ambedkarite thought. The Dalit Panthers, a 1970s collective of poets, writers, and activists within the Ambedkarite movement, were inspired by the Black Panther Party in the U.S., founded by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. Angela Davis, a key Black Panther member, also features in Vikrant Bhise’s Panther series. Alongside these iconic figures who played a prominent role in fighting for democratic ideals and social justice through these movements, Bhise also portrays ordinary people, symbolising marginalisation across gender and religion. The body of work also responds to global conflicts, from everyday struggles to the genocide in Gaza, representing landscapes and lives scarred by violence.

Trace and Form emerge from the rich continuum of women’s textile traditions, understanding identity as accumulated fragments of experience rather than a singular line. Through the deliberate act of layering — beads upon threads, cotton upon stone — these works trace women’s creative expression across time, creating spaces where ancestral knowledge meets contemporary practice. The works hold layers of memory, bringing together different histories and voices to create a shared sense of identity. The textile surfaces are built through careful beadwork using recycled seed and glass beads with cotton and silk thread. Hand-carved black stone bound with handwoven cotton cord extends this exploration into sculpture, creating a dialogue between permanence and fragility. Through hand embroidery, hand-sculpting, wrapping, and knotting techniques, these diverse materials are transformed into large-scale forms that resist conventional categorization. Using diverse mediums and handcraft techniques, the works examine the relationship between past and present, positioning craft practice as both historically grounded and thoroughly contemporary, respecting inherited traditions while remaining open to transformation through experimentation.

At the heart of this practice lie the foundational values of the Chanakya School: honouring women’s practices, affirming the power of collective expression, and nurturing the transmission of knowledge across generations. Through deep engagement with diverse textile methodologies, the school extends the possibilities of the medium, advancing new paradigms of material practice while remaining grounded in inherited wisdom.

Employing a range of processes that are central to her works, including photographic transfers from personal archives, collage, painting, stitching and drawing, Radhika Khimji (b. 1979) pushes the edges of her practice. Khimji’s ongoing interests in expanding the possibilities of thinking through shapes, geometry, and the body in relation to landscapes are often the point of departure in the works on view. Abstracted landscape forms and images from construction sites seem ensconced within innumerable repeated dots and oblong shapes, an act that makes the surface of her works tactile and acutely textured.

Soumya Sankar Bose (b. 1990) reconstructs archival materials and oral history into photography, films, alternative archives, and artist books. His hybrid mode of practice interweaving long-term research and engagement with local communities including his own family history accentuates certain subaltern experiences of the marginalised yet resilient in post-Partition Bengal. Through the film and the photographs from A Discreet Exit Through Darkness, Bose seeks to delve deep into the darkest recesses of his family’s history and examine the various enmeshed narratives by recounting a telling episode. The work also offers an insight into how imagination, folklore and superstition supplant the lack of a coherent narrative when memory fails to navigate the scarred terrains of an obscure past. It evocatively brings alive a time, torn asunder by the impending personal and political upheaval around the Bangladesh Liberation War and reflects on how collective memory becomes instrumental in substantiating a tale mired with irreparable losses and brutal chronicles.