Sayan Chanda: How Many Fires, How Many Suns, How Many Dawns?
Textiles have long been vessels for belief: folded into dowries, draped over altars, stitched with protection in mind. In his major new commission for De La Warr Pavilion (on show from 14 February until 31 May 2026), Kolkata-born, London-based artist Sayan Chanda returns to this intimate terrain, using fibre and clay to reimagine myth as something porous, plural and defiantly alive.
Sayan Chanda. Photo credits: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan, Cove Park. Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary.
Titled How Many Fires, How Many Suns, How Many Dawns? – a line drawn from the Rig Veda – the exhibition invokes ancestral spirits not in rivalry but in search of truth. The phrase gestures towards multiplicity: how many beginnings can exist at once? How many forms can a story take? Chanda’s answer unfolds through the repetitive gestures of weaving, stitching, quilting and hand-built clay, as he reshapes votive objects, folk divinities and mythic narratives through the lens of identity and postcolonial theory.
For Chanda, repetition is never merely formal. “In textiles, nothing is achieved without the body… As the fabric grows, I grow with it,” he reflects. Each work becomes a record of duration and adjustment — gesture settling into habitual motion, function edging towards ritual. “The swift passing of the weft thread, the beating and packing of the weft, all involve a set of movements repeated until they become muscle memory.” In this way, inherited knowledge is carried forward while remaining open to transformation.
Sayan Chanda, Who Dwells Within Trees, 2025. Vintage quilt, cotton, 285x120cm. Photo credit: Mike Bolam, Cample Line. Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary.
At the heart of the exhibition is Bonbibi, the forest goddess of the Sundarbans. Traditionally worshipped by both Muslim and Hindu communities as a protector, Bonbibi stands as a rare syncretic figure. Yet, in recent decades, she has been gradually absorbed into more orthodox Hindu frameworks. Chanda resists this narrowing. Raised in the Shakta tradition, he is acutely aware of how goddesses have been subordinated into patriarchal archetypes by both conservative and colonial retellings. His practice seeks to return them to what he calls their “primal, uninhibited forms”.
Here, Bonbibi appears as an expanse of vintage Kantha quilts. Hand-stitched by women from worn saris and domestic cloth, Kantha is born of necessity and repetition. For Chanda, these quilts are an archive of women’s labour – layered with memory, care and subtle acts of resistance. In presenting the goddess through this material, he locates divinity within everyday gestures: mending, piecing, holding together.
Sayan Chanda, Neither Land Nor Water, 2025, 40 pieces of glazed earthenware, dimensions variable. Photo credit: Mike Bolam, Cample Line. Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary.
Flanking Bonbibi are two woven guardians, while a still body of water reflects and distorts the scene, holding calm and the possibility of change. Ceramic animals and mangrove-root forms scatter the gallery floor, their metallic skins shifting between clarity and ambiguity. Some figures hover between human and animal, suggesting a world where boundaries dissolve and kinship extends beyond the visible.
Following his solo presentation at Cample Line in 2025 and inclusion in the Kochi Muziris Biennale, this marks Chanda’s first solo institutional exhibition in England. It also establishes him as a significant presence within contemporary textile practice — an artist who understands cloth not merely as material, but as a site of memory, myth-making and the continual negotiation of belonging.
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Further Information:
Sayan Chanda is featured in our current publication, Selvedge Issue 129, Repeat.
How Many Fires, How Many Suns, How Many Dawns? in on show at the De La Warr Pavilion, 14 February – 31 May 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Sayan Chanda, Who Dwells Within Trees, 2025. Vintage quilt, cotton, 285x120cm. Photo credit: Mike Bolam, Cample Line. Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary.
All further images as credited in photo captions.