Lakshmi Madhavan

Lakshmi Madhavan is an international contemporary textile artist working between Mumbai and Balaramapuram (Kerala). Her practice bridges material culture, feminist memory, and collaborative making, with Kasavu—Kerala’s iconic white-and-gold handwoven textile - at its core. Through long-term engagement with the Balaramapuram weaving community, one of the region’s most historic Kasavu centres, Lakshmi reimagines cloth as a site of identity, labour, and cultural memory. Positioning Kasavu not as a static symbol but as a living archive, her work explores the politics of cloth and the body, examining intersections of gender, ritual, labour, and inheritance. Grounded in rigorous research and embodied collaboration, her practice offers a decolonial reading of textile histories that prioritises lived experience over institutional narratives.

Lakshmi’s work “Looming Bodies” is currently being shown at the recent exhibitions include Sediments of Becoming: Fossilised Present, Summoned Pasts at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, curated by Marina Schulz and Tunty Chauhan. Titled Looming Bodies, the work emerged through years of engagement with the Balaramapuram weaving community and explored how Kasavu is not merely a heritage textile, but a living knowledge system carried within the bodies of its makers. The work was first displayed in Kochi as a collateral project with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025-2026 and is currently being  presented at the Hermitage in Russia. 

Her work was also exhibited at the Textile Matters at Galerie des Gobelins & Mobilier National, Paris, conceived collaboratively by Christian Louboutin, Artistic Director. Structured across seven visual chapters, the exhibition explored the intersections of tradition and contemporary practice, situating textile histories within a global cultural framework. She has presented a solo exhibition at Akara Contemporary, Mumbai, followed by two showings at Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles. This was subsequently marked by a significant acquisition by the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, where her work will form part of the museum’s emerging Kerala-section—signaling an important institutional recognition of Kasavu within global museum narratives.

Lakshmi has exhibited at major national and international institutions including the National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai), National Museum (Delhi), Melbourne Museum, Hampi Art Labs, Craft Museum (Delhi), Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Hermitage ( Russia). She was Artist-in-Residence at India Art Fair 2023 and was selected for the International Art & Woman Book List 2025.

Her work is held in prominent private and institutional collections, with commissions and acquisitions by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Devi Art Foundation, JSW Collection, Avtar Foundation, and Taj Malabar, Cochin, among others. Lakshmi Madhavan is widely regarded as a leading voice in India’s contemporary textile arts, offering a rigorously research-driven, feminist, and decolonial practice that continues to shape international conversations around cloth, memory, and labour.