Textile can often have a curious relationship with the word monumental. We tend to save it for bronze and stone, materials that come pre-loaded with heft. Cloth has to earn scale the slow way, one stitch or knot at a time, and that arithmetic is exactly what Belong puts on display. Chanakya School's exhibition, running at Experimenter Colaba, Mumbai until 17 October, is the atelier's first solo show at this particular gallery space and its second with Experimenter overall, marking forty years of collective practice under Karishma Swali's direction.
Chanakya School, Belong, Experimenter - Colaba, Mumbai, 2026. stallation views. Images courtesy Experimenter. Photos by Shivani Goel.
Experimenter itself has a fitting backdrop for the work. Founded in Kolkata in 2009 by Prateek and Priyanka Raja, the gallery opened its Colaba outpost in 2022 inside a restored 1890s building in South Mumbai, a space whose own history of material renewal sits comfortably alongside an exhibition built from accumulation and reuse.
Chanakya School, Within I, 2026. Organic cotton, linen and silk threads with glass beads on cotton textile.
Chanakya School, Within III (detail), 2026. Organic cotton, linen and silk threads with glass beads on cotton textile.
The central work, Within, makes the argument most literally. Organic cotton and silk thread, glass and recycled seed beads accumulate by the thousand into surfaces where figures and landscapes surface and dissolve depending on where you stand. Nothing here is symbolic in isolation. The meaning is in the accumulation, in the fact that no single bead or stitch could carry the image alone.
That same logic runs through the show's engagement with Prakriti, the animating force of nature figured through the divine feminine, and the Saptamatrikas, the Seven Mothers associated with Shakti. In Flowers In Our Forest I and Sun Within II, cotton cord, mohair, jute and linen are worked into herringbone, basket weave and chevron structures at a scale that pushes the textile toward environment rather than surface. The qualities traditionally assigned to the Saptamatrikas — curiosity, insight, nourishment, protection, transformation, resilience, collective strength — read here less as attributes of distant deities than as descriptions of what the labour itself demands.
Chanakya School, Saptamatrika I: Brähmi, 2026. Handwoven jute sculpture.
Chanakya School, Saptamatrika IV: Värähi, 2026. Handwoven jute sculpture.
Saptamatrika, the show's sculptural centrepiece, takes this furthest. Built from coconut, banana and jute fibre, it uses braiding, coiling, binding, wrapping and weaving, techniques that normally stay flat, and lets them build outward into volume instead. The piece raises a genuinely useful question for anyone thinking about craft and sculpture as separate categories: why should mass need to start from something solid, when it can simply be gathered into being?
Common Ground works the opposite way, with raffia crossing dense embroidered ground before fraying into unfinished edges, a reminder that every length of cloth carries a history of fields, extraction and labour inside it.
Chanakya School has previously worked with Judy Chicago, Mickalene Thomas, Faith Ringgold, Isabella Ducrot and Barthélémy Toguo, and collaborated with Maria Grazia Chiuri at the Vatican Apostolic Library last year. What Belongargues, in the end, is that scale in textile was never about size at all. It was always about how much handling a material can hold.
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Further Information:
Belong by the Chanakya School is on show at Experimenter Colaba, Mumbai until 17 October.
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Find out more about the Chanakya School in Selvedge Issue 129, Repeat
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Image Credits:
Lead: Chanakya School, Saptamatrika IX: Mahesvari, 2026. Handwoven jute sculpture.
All further images as credited in captions.