Kalhath Institute celebrates its tenth anniversary spotlighting collaborations with Villa Swagatam
As the Kalhath Institute celebrates its tenth anniversary, a new exhibition at the Rooshad Shroff Gallery in Mumbai looks back at a decade of experimentation, transmission and collaboration around Indian embroidery, including a particularly rich chapter developed through Villa Swagatam.
Founded in Lucknow in 2016 by Maximiliano Modesti and Mohammed Amine Dadda, the Kalhath Institute works to recognise, preserve and renew excellence in Indian embroidery and textile craftsmanship. Its approach places craftspeople and their knowledge at the centre of the creative process, while creating opportunities for traditional techniques to encounter contemporary art and design.
Since launching its artist-in-residence programme in 2018, Kalhath has invited artists from India and around the world to work closely with its master embroiderers. These residencies are conceived not simply as opportunities to learn a technique, but as spaces of reciprocal experimentation: artists encounter generations of artisanal knowledge, while craftspeople are invited to reinterpret their practices through new artistic languages. Over the years, these collaborations have resulted in more than twenty exhibitions across Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America.
A partnership at the heart of Villa Swagatam
Since the launch of Villa Swagatam in 2023, Kalhath Institute has become an important partner of the programme in the field of arts, crafts and design. Villa Swagatam brings together a network of residency partners to encourage long-term artistic exchange between France, India and the wider region, creating opportunities for artists to immerse themselves in new territories, techniques and communities. Kalhath’s residency programme is today part of this network.
The partnership has enabled several artists to spend extended periods in Lucknow, working directly with Kalhath’s embroiderers and developing bodies of work in which the distinction between artist and artisan, contemporary practice and traditional savoir-faire, is deliberately questioned.
Moroccan artist Yassine Balbzioui, during his Swagatam residency, collaborated with 21 craftspeople to produce eleven works combining drawing, painting and embroidery. Inspired by Lucknow, its embroidery traditions and its fairy tales, the works developed through what the artist describes as a creative “ping-pong” with the craftspeople: an image would be drawn, embroidered, and then transformed again by the artist. The project subsequently travelled internationally, including to the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Marrakech and the Subversive Threads Festival in Germany.
French painter July Ancel similarly immersed herself in Lucknow during a sixteen-week Swagatam residency. Working with 21 Kalhath artisans, she created 23 works combining oil painting, Indian embroidery and weaving. The collaboration culminated in Exotic Weavings: July Ancel’s Journey Through India, presented at Gin Huang Gallery in Taipei in 2024.
For Paris-based multidisciplinary artist Deborah Di Fiore, the residency became an opportunity to develop a new artistic language through materials and techniques while placing slowness, transmission and mutual learning at the centre of the process. Her collaboration reflects one of the fundamental ideas behind Villa Swagatam: a residency as an encounter in which knowledge moves in both directions, and in which the process itself becomes as important as the resulting works.
American-French artist Lauren Januhowski explored Lucknow’s textile and architectural heritage while developing works around women’s experiences, memory and the transmission of knowledge. For Januhowski, the residency became a bridge between her own visual storytelling and the embroiderers’ generational knowledge.
French artist Pauline Guerrier’s work explores subjects including ecology, superstition, the body, space and memory, while incorporating artisanal techniques as artistic languages in their own right. Apart from enriching collaborations with the artisans in Lucknow, she also created a series of works experimenting with the rich block print traditions of Bagru in Rajasthan.
For Franco-Algerian artist Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, embroidery became a means of connecting distinct cultural histories. During her residency at the Kalhath Institute, she worked with the embroiderers on an embroidered burnous, the traditional hooded garment that holds an important symbolic place in Algeria. The resulting work brought together her longstanding exploration of memory, identity and representation with the creativity and technical knowledge of Lucknow’s embroiderers. The piece was later presented in the exhibition OVERTIME (Prolongation) at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam in Paris in March 2026.
Looking towards the next generation
Ten years after Kalhath’s creation, the collaboration with Villa Swagatam continues.
As part of the fourth edition of Villa Swagatam, French designer-artist duo Manuel Leromain and Martin Schepkens will be welcomed in residence at the Kalhath Institute, opening a new chapter in this ongoing dialogue between contemporary creation and Lucknow’s extraordinary embroidery traditions.
At a moment when technology is profoundly reshaping the creative industries, Kalhath’s work also offers a powerful reminder of another form of intelligence: that of the hand, cumulative, patient and rooted in the transmission of knowledge. As the Institute enters its second decade, Villa Swagatam is proud to continue accompanying this living dialogue between artists and artisans, France and India, heritage and contemporary creation.
The exhibition runs from July 27 till September 30 at Gallery Rooshad Shroff, Ballard Estate.