Shruti Gaonkar (b. 1984, Mumbai, India) is an interdisciplinary artist, architect, and facilitator whose work moves through textiles, performance, material archives, and collective imagination. Rooted in postcolonial feminist thought, her practice weaves tactile ecologies of queer softness, radical care, and embodied memory across installations, sculptures, participatory workshops, and research-led projects.

Working primarily with natural fibers, found textiles, hand-felting, sewing, and dyeing practices, Shruti’s evolving body of work explores what she calls postcolonial softness — a form of resistance through tenderness, play, and speculative world-building. She engages with wool ecologies, indigenous material practices, land memory, and questions of systemic erasure, while resisting rigid binaries of hard/soft, nature/culture, and center/periphery. Her playful approach also extends into formats such as participatory games, speculative archives, and soft cartographies.

Shruti is currently based in Mumbai after time spent living and working across three continents. Her work is deeply informed by entanglements between climate, gender, care, ritual, labor, and migratory histories. She is part of Campervan Collective, a participatory public art initiative formed during her time at the Royal College of Art, London, where she completed her MA in Contemporary Art Practice.

Her current long-term project Shunya unfolds across soft sculptures, performances, and site-specific works, imagining speculative ecologies and architectures of tenderness in postcolonial contexts. Shruti's practice invites playful resistance and communal reimagining — stitching spaces where fragility, resilience, and joy coexist.

Curriculum Vitae

2024