Sayan Chanda at CAMPLE LINE

About

London-based artist Sayan Chanda will stage a solo exhibition of new and recent textile and ceramic works from across the various series – ‘Jomi’, ‘Bohurupee’, ‘Dieties’ and ‘Shapeshifters’ – that make up his wider body of work. 

Chanda often draws uponthe rituals he witnessed as a child and the living traditions with which he was surrounded when growing up in Kolkata, reimagining votive objects, folk narratives and indigenous rituals as hybrid ambiguous forms that function as totems, portals and talismans. 

Through weaving, stitching, dyeing and hand-building, he gives physical forms to his anxieties, and to mythologies and individual and collective memory. Chanda’s Bohurupee, for instance, evoke Bengali folk masks made and worn by the Bohurupee community. Combining tight and compacted weave with bursts of loosened yarn.  Cleo Roberts-Komireddi has suggested that they have the potential to ‘become bodies in themselves. Eye hollows serve as portals, the skirt of fibres as limbs.’  

In his textile work, Chanda often uses found clothes that can be of deep personal resonance, such as vintage Kantha quilts from Bengal, gamchhas (coarse cotton cloth commonly used as a scarf or headdress across eastern parts of South Asia) or Jandami fabrics - deconstructing, knotting, folding, embroidering and weaving them into objects, reliefs and tapestries. 

His Jomi series - titled after the Bengali word for ground/land/field – was partly inspired by childhood memories of female elders reading poet Jasimuddin’s ‘Nakshi Kanthar Math’ (The Field of the Embroidered Quilt) (1928) to him. Of his Deity works he has said: ‘The Deity series was my first body of work made using vintage Kantha. I was trying to find a system, akin to ritual tying and wrapping observed commonly in folk and indigenous customs, often in the context of wish-making or wish-fulfilment.’ 

Chanda’s solo exhibitions include Jhaveri Contemporary, south Mumbai (2022) and Commonage Projects, London (2022-23). In 2023, his work was included in a major travelling exhibition Actions for the Earth: Art, Care and Ecology, curated by Sharmila Wood. He also undertook a Thread residency in rural southeastern Senegal, which allows local and international artists to work in the village Sinthian and learn through its model of local production. In 2024, his work was included in the group show, Reverberations: Textile as Echo, Green Art Gallery in Dubai.