Asia Now Paris, 2025: Sutradhar: Narratives in Embroidery

Milaaya Art Gallery presents a collaboration with four leading Indian artists - Nilima Sheikh, Ranbir Kaleka, Manjunath Kamath, and Nikhil Chopra and the master artisans of our Mumbai atelier. Together, we explore embroidery as a medium that bridges the realms of contemporary art and traditional craft. This unique partnership translates diverse artistic languages, from painting to performance, into richly textured textile works. Each artist contributes a distinct voice to this collection: Sheikh’s intricate scrolls evoke layered histories, drawing from Indian miniature painting and poetic narratives to weave stories of cultural memory; Kaleka constructs surreal, cinematic scenes that blend dreamlike imagery, creating embroidered tableaux that feel both timeless and otherworldly; Kamath assembles fragmented forms into hybrid narratives, combining mythological and contemporary motifs to explore identity and transformation; and Chopra captures landscapes as acts of memory and performance, using embroidery to map personal and collective journeys across time and space. Through close dialogue with Milaaya’s artisans, these visions are brought to life in fiber, foregrounding the beauty of texture, meticulous detail, and a shared creative process. Hand embroidery serves as the focal point of this project, not merely as a medium but as a profound expression that shapes the artistic dialogue and overall narrative. It acts as a connective thread, intertwining the artists’ conceptual explorations with the artisans’ technical mastery. Each stitch carries intention, embedding layers of meaning into the fabric, where the tactile quality of embroidery amplifies the emotional and intellectual depth of the works. This medium, rooted in tradition yet endlessly adaptable, becomes a language through which contemporary stories are told, fostering a dynamic interplay between innovation and heritage. The exhibition's title Sutradhar, a Sanskrit word meaning “narrator” or “thread-holder” that aptly speaks to the art of storytelling through material. These works unfold as visual narratives of collaboration, where contemporary expression and age-old techniques are interwoven to shape new ways of seeing