32 Gestures of Devotion

Inspired by the classic Indian text, Singhasan Battisi (Thirty-Two Tales of the Throne), in which the carvings in the seat of Vikramaditya come to life and narrate stories about the fabled emperor, this work presents 32 oil paintings of garments once used to dress the artist’s grandmother’s Gopal idol (the infant Krishna). Their folds, stains, and tears testify to the intertwined lives of the divine child and its devotee. Atop the paintings, a projection, set to Alice Coltrane’s Transcendence, stages hands engaged in choreographies of care across domestic, religious, and institutional contexts. Using footage from YouTube tutorials—dressing a baby, adorning Gopal, conserving textiles—the work exposes shared rituals of care in childrearing, worship, and museum collection maintenance, imbuing these objects with an auratic charge that exceeds their present state.

The artist forages for sensations of touch, belonging, and care, embedded in objects once made, held, and used by women in her family for daily devotional practices. Having grown up with parents whose inter-caste marriage was rejected by her father’s family’s religiosity, complicates Chakrabarti’s relationship with these seemingly harmless things. Rummaging through likely and unlikely ‘inheritances’, becomes a way to come to terms with loss, contend with the politics of ritual, and trace ideological genealogies.