As Women’s Day approaches, a quietly radical exhibition has taken root in Chennai — one where garments and stitches become the main medium of expression. The exhibition, Shakti: Threads of Female Power, a collaboration between Alliance Française de Madras and Goethe-Institut Chennai and managed by Aditi Jain, grew out of a four-week residency that brought together artists from India, France, and Germany. They were asked to sit with the idea of Shakti, let the city in, and see what came out the other side.
Bettina Mileta noticed the metro first. The women’s compartment, the saris, all that colour moving quietly through the city. Her silk installation Flux began there— naturally dyed, patchworked in geometric patterns drawn from Madras Check, and hung across space. She has spent years thinking about why textiles, like the women who made them, have been kept out of public life. “my work examines the historical tensions embedded in textile production — between repression and agency, domestic confinement and public presence,” she says.”
Marielle Maury’s answer to Shakti is a cape. Low Signals is made from handloom cotton sourced in Erode, and has worked with an embroidery technique from her home in southern France —two textile traditions meeting in a single garment. It’s not a loud piece. And that’s entirely the point. For her, Shakti is intuition: “a humble, unexplainable, yet powerful intelligence.”
Meanwhile, Sanskruti Shukla spent her weeks here watching women go about their days. A garland maker. A fisherwoman. A sanitation worker. In Ritual in Routine, she has needle-felted all three into soft sculptures modelled on Tamil Nadu’s temple carvings. Talking about her second piece, The Fibre of Our Being, she says, reimagines divine feminine representations, often erased or dissolved over time, as a cosmic dance held by a wavering thread that connects us all.
Munira Nizam Diwan’s work, Unravel / Stitch / Cut, explores the invisible weight of societal expectations placed on women. Through stitched and dyed fabric, Munira transforms cloth into a living skin. Two bags invite participation: One stitched for women to cut as an act of letting go, the other holding needles for those still burdened to add their stitches.
For Anna Cambier’s Drama-Queen, she uses a block printed textiles, natural pigments, and wood structure. “I wanted to recreate the female body as a structure one can enter, explore, alter, and play with—an interior landscape made of skin, patterns, softness, and strange openings. ”
Meanwhile, Kalyani Pramod presents an interactive textile installation, inviting visitors to actively engage with material, process, and reflection.
Open to all. At 6 pm. At Alliance Française de Madras, Nungambakkam, Chennai.
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