Bihar Museum And Chanakya Foundation Present Cosmic Garden

Bihar Museum, one of India’s foremost cultural institutions, together with Chanakya Foundation, presents Cosmic Garden, bringing into dialogue the practices of Madhvi Parekh and Manu Parekh with Karishma Swali and the Chanakya School. Rooted in the cultural and artistic traditions of the Indian subcontinent, the exhibition traces the ongoing exchange between painting, sculpture and textile-based forms of making, considering how visual languages can travel across materials, generations and modes of authorship to acquire new forms and meanings.

Paintings and sculptures by Madhvi and Manu Parekh from the late 1970s to 2023 are placed alongside large-scale interdisciplinary textile works created with Karishma Swali and the Chanakya School. Emerging from an ongoing artistic dialogue, these works establish their own material and conceptual language, bringing individual artistic vision into relation with collective knowledge and making.

 First presented in 2024 as a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, at Salone Verde – Art & Social Club in Venice, Cosmic Garden was curated by Maria Alicata and Paola Ugolini. Conceived through a multidisciplinary approach, the exhibition examines relationships between artistic disciplines, material knowledge and textile practice, while reconsidering embroidery beyond its historical associations with gendered and domestic practice.

 Madhvi Parekh’s visual language emerges from an interweaving of childhood memory, mythology, vernacular traditions and abstraction. Goddesses, celestial beings and symbolic forms inhabit pictorial spaces in which lived experience and the imaginary continually converge. Drawing upon memories of Gujarat as well as mythological and spiritual narratives, her works construct worlds in which the everyday and the cosmic coexist. Manu Parekh’s practice brings Indian cultural and esoteric traditions into conversation with modernist and expressionist vocabularies. Lines, crosses, flowers, spirals and germinating forms recur across his compositions as structures through which ideas of energy, transformation and shakti—the feminine life force—are articulated. Across their distinct practices, Madhvi and Manu Parekh share an enduring engagement with memory, spirituality, nature and the symbolic as generative spaces for artistic enquiry.

Within the Chanakya School, this dialogue gives rise to a distinct body of work. Under the artistic direction of Karishma Swali, the visual languages of Madhvi and Manu Parekh encounter the School’s own vocabulary of stitch, fibre, texture and scale. Their imagery becomes a point of departure for new interdisciplinary works shaped through collective making and the accumulated knowledge of the hand. Hand embroidery operates as a mode of drawing and material thinking: line becomes thread, surface acquires dimension, and gesture is articulated through textile and temporalities. From this process emerges a unique artistic language situated between individual vision and collective practice.

“We are delighted that Bihar Museum, in collaboration with the Chanakya Foundation, is presenting a prestigious exhibition such as Cosmic Garden. First showcased at the Venice Biennale in 2024, the exhibition brings together art, craft, and tradition in a remarkable way. The artworks of Manu Parekh and Madhvi Parekh, alongside the exquisite embroidery practices of Karishma Swali and the Chanakya School, offer new expressions of our rich cultural heritage. The exhibition particularly celebrates the creativity and craftsmanship of women artisans. At Bihar Museum, we remain committed to bringing internationally significant exhibitions to Bihar, offering our audiences opportunities to explore and appreciate the diverse dimensions of Indian art and culture “ Shri Anjani Kumar Singh, Director General, Bihar Museum

Founded in 2016, the Chanakya School of Craft is a non-profit institution and artist collective working across education, pedagogy, research and material experimentation. Drawing upon more than 300 embroidery and weaving traditions, its practice brings inherited textile knowledge into contemporary artistic enquiry while placing women at the centre as practitioners, custodians and transmitters of these knowledge systems. More than 1,400 women have trained and graduated from the school since its founding, contributing to a growing community through which knowledge is learnt, practised, questioned and passed forward. At the Bihar Museum, Cosmic Garden enters a new geographical and institutional context. The works carry with them the histories, techniques and relationships through which they were created, while opening new connections between image and material, individual gesture and collective practice. In bringing these distinct artistic languages into proximity, Cosmic Garden considers cultural knowledge as a living continuum, transmitted through making, expanded through dialogue and renewed across generations.