How designer-artist Viraj Khanna breaks gendered identity, stitch by stitch

Though there are not enough women today who practise embroidery as a hobby compared to about five decades back, needle work continues to be shackled with a gendered identity that it was accorded some centuries ago. That’s perhaps the reason why Viraj Khanna’s ‘embroidered paintings’ stood out at a recent group exhibition, titled ‘Like Share Subscribe’, at the art gallery Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Los Angeles. For want of a better explanation, the term ‘embroidered paintings’ is being used here to elucidate a work of art made with needles and threads, just as a painting is made with brushes and paints.

The Thread of Life

Khanna’s works comprise abstract as well as figurative embroideries, playing cheekily on the theme of the exhibition, ‘Like Share Subscribe’. Some figurative works feature young people at restaurants, posing with fanciful food which is designed to look good on social media platforms, with intricate details of a well-provided-for table. That’s stupendous considering these images have been created in thread, definitely a more delicate task than creating the same image in paint.

Highly animated, they succeed in capturing the emotions of the people at the table as they survey or partake in the spread in front of them, all with smiles configured for public consumption. The titles of these works too sum up the instant life of social media generation — An hour into the Blind Date, made in French knot on cotton, 34 x 28 inch; Cannot eat without Papad, embroidery on cotton, 34 x 25 ½ in; Dal Makhani is my favourite, embroidery on cotton, 35 ½ x 34 ½ inch; and I want noodles!, embroidery on cotton, 34 ½ x 25 ½ inch, among others.

It’s difficult to decide what is more awe-inspiring, Khanna’s figurative embroideries or abstract works; the latter appear like regular essays in abstraction made in paint. Their titles too, such as Swiped Right on You, take a jibe at social media culture. Commenting on the most defining aspect of his generation’s life — social media and the constant need to be updated on it even while chasing more and more followers — through art must have been an interesting exercise for 29-year-old Khanna. 

He says, “I believe there’s a troubling sense of permanence associated with technology. Firstly, there’s a loss of privacy due to the devices we use, and the data collected from us. Secondly, once something personal or controversial is leaked or shared, it’s typically impossible to erase. This can have severe consequences for many people. For instance, if someone were to leak an image of mine, it would carry dangerous long-term implications. While social media attention spans are short-lived, our lives are documented and preserved in a way that was previously unimaginable.”

The wondrous juxtaposition of embroidery — one of the oldest skills known to humans — with the very latest disruptive invention of social media is not lost on anyone paying even a cursory look to Khanna’s works. So, how did a young man like him get interested in this art?

Inspiration at Home

Khanna, born in Kolkata in 1995, is the son of renowned fashion designer Anamika Khanna, which explains his natural proclivity for textiles and yarns. But that is not how his journey in the world of creativity began. He completed a degree in Business Administration in 2018 and joined his mother’s eponymous fashion label. But with the ensuing pandemic and lockdown, he made collages to keep the company’s social media handles running. That attracted the attention of gallerist Somak Mitra, who did his first exhibition at The Loft, Kolkata.

Khanna, who is currently pursuing MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, says, “My first show was titled, ‘What My Mother Didn’t Teach Me’. Somak Mitra suggested that I keep my fashion and art identity separate. Because of this, I decided not to incorporate any embroidery work into this show. The title of the show was also a playful way of indicating that I was venturing into something completely new. Following this show, Tao Art Gallery in Mumbai invited me to do another solo. This time, I chose to work with embroidery since it was a large space, and I wanted to experiment with different imagery and create something unique. The title of the subsequent show, humorously, was ‘What My Mother Didn’t Teach Me & and Some Things She Did!’.

It was during his second solo show with the Tao Art Gallery of Mumbai in 2022 that Khanna embarked on employing embroidery as a medium of art, beyond its traditional and widely known role as an embellishment. He shares, “Looking back now, I realize I was just suppressing myself creatively by deciding not to work with textile for the first show. Embroidery comes most naturally to me since I’ve been exposed to it growing up. I wanted to creatively express certain ideas and I could only do them using embroidery. Initially, there was resistance from the karigars (artisans) I was working with when I attempted to create something absolutely new. I had given someone a specific design to execute, but he returned the work to me, explaining that everyone in his community was scared and unwilling to proceed due to superstitious reasons — they couldn’t recognize the figure I had asked them to work on. It took time and explanation, but eventually, the work progressed and finished. This experience was pivotal.” Since then, Khanna has rapidly evolved his visual vocabulary with experimentations, most of which is evident in his latest exhibition at Los Angeles. 

Unbeknownst to himself, Khanna, with his embroidery art, is helping tear down deep-set gender stereotypes associated with the medium, and bringing this genre of art to mainstream galleries where it rarely finds place alongside paintings and sculptures. And it helps massively that it’s a man employing this skill.

At least since the 19^th century, artists the world over — mostly women but not exclusively— have been trying to get embroidery its due as a genre of visual arts, with little success. Most prominent of these was the Arts and Crafts movement in the British Isles, in the second half of the 19^th century, which emphasised a new appreciation for decorative arts — including embroidery — throughout Europe. One of the founders of this movement was designer William Morris, whose daughter May was a skillful embroiderer and a pioneering feminist figure.

In more recent times, some world-renowned artists have employed embroidery in their works. These include Judy Chicago (b. 1939), inarguably one of USA’s most important living artists, who is known for her large birth and creation images, often depicted through embroidery. Closer home, Gurgaon-based Gopika Nath is one of the well-known practitioners of embroidery as a form of art in India but there are very few artists of her ilk. In fact, India’s first woman artist to sign her works, Sunayani Devi (1875-1962), created works in embroidery; she was a sister of Abanindranath Tagore, the Bengal School pioneer, and a nephew of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

It is not clearly known when certain activities vital and integral to both men and women alike — such as cooking food, cleaning the house, dressing up the children, and dressing up the home and self with knitting, crochet and embroidery — got gendered identities. When invented, embroidery became an important item of trade for certain civilizations — such as India and China over which they built their robust international reputation in ancient and medieval times —yet over a period of time, it came to be regarded as ‘women’s work’.

In a circular societal revenge, when women started breaking glass ceiling in roles hitherto set aside for men, they gave up what had until then been called ‘women’s work’ as it was associated with the suppression of women. In the gender politics of art and crafts, it is difficult to fathom what is more ridiculous — that embroidery came to be associated as ‘time pass’ work for women only, or that it was a global phenomenon.