Method and madness at Kanike Studios

The rest of the bungalow retains the feel of a lived-in home that’s slowly morphed into something else. The main room, once a living area, is now split into their workstations. Vivek’s corner is toward the back, quiet and ordered, where large windows allow soft natural light to fall on his work table. Krishanu’s space is crammed with all manner of objects, prints and even a stack of dusty CCTVs salvaged from a nearby kabaadiwala. Indu’s area sits somewhere between the two—neither chaos nor control—lined with jars, terracotta busts, steam distillation tubes and tools she prefers to keep out in the open. “I don’t like cupboards,” she laughs. “I want everything within reach. Because when a thought comes, I need to touch something to keep it alive.”

MEMORIES IN SALT, SCENT AND SILVER

These days, the studio’s walls hold more than just signs of process. Tucked into corners and hallways are fragments of the artists’ own works and pieces that have returned from exhibitions or simply never left. Nothing is labelled. Nothing is curated. But if you linger, you begin to notice the threads. Their practices may differ, but their sensibility is shared—slow, handmade, rooted in memory.

At the studio’s reception, Vivek’s salt prints from the series “The Vanishing Sea” are displayed inside a lightbox. Photographed on the shores of Cambay in Gujarat, the series was inspired by the 14th-century traveller Ibn Battuta’s descriptions of the port as a once-bustling hub of trade and fragrance. “I was thinking about what had disappeared,” Vivek says. “Cambay was once bustling. But today it feels eerily still.” The prints are rendered in soft monochrome, their emptiness deliberate and their stillness heavy. In another hallway, his albumen prints—sepia-toned and mounted like 19th-century stereograms—revisit his own memories of growing up in Bangalore. Each image is paired with a short piece of text. “They’re not photos of the memory,” he says. “But they open the door to it.”

Indu’s practice is deeply sensorial. In her corner, she’s set up a fully functional olfactory lab using steam distillation techniques. Her early works explored scent as trauma, including a project to recreate the smell of her abuser using collected samples of male sweat. Later came Vasane, a scent map of Bangalore bound in a book with 12 smells. Her most recent work involved distilling pastoral scents from the Deccan plateau like cow dung, pulikulam wool and grazing soil. She also sculpts, and terracotta works line one side of her studio—busts of women who died in dowry-related violence, each with a diya placed at the centre. “These were women who never got a proper funeral,” she says. “This was our way of remembering them.”

Krishanu’s work tends toward abstraction and raw process. He works with wet plate collodion, gum oil, salt and silver gelatine. His prints are often ghostly and unpredictable, shaped as much by chemistry as by image. At the entrance to the darkroom hangs a suite of his gum oil prints of Java City, the now-defunct Bangalore café where the Kanike crew once gathered in their early years. “Back when we didn’t have smartphones,” he says. “Back when we met in real life.”