Viraj Khanna’s canvas, the big fat Indian wedding

For artist Viraj Khanna, the Indian wedding is the perfect ground to explore the themes he finds most interesting: excess, consumerism, and the public versions of ourselves we post in an Instagram-friendly era. ‘Why Did I Say Yes?’, his first major solo in the US, is a witty and emotionally resonant critique of the Indian wedding as both a site of cultural memory and modern consumer excess.

On display at Los Angeles’ Rajiv Menon Contemporary gallery, in this exhibition, Viraj reconstructs personal and social wedding narratives, mapping them onto larger concerns of identity and erasure in an age of mega-consumption.

Through his use of traditional textile embroidery techniques — particularly aari and zardozi methods — Viraj presents a loving, gentle, satirical look at the madness and delirium that surround the big Indian wedding. Drawing on his own family legacy in the fashion industry — his mother is designer Anamika Khanna — and working collaboratively with traditional artisans, he transforms methods of luxury apparel making into a powerful mode of artistic expression.

Taking us through the process of creating the artwork, he says, “All of my work is entirely hand-embroidered on fabric — there’s no painting involved in this series. I often use upcycled fabric, stitching different pieces together, and incorporate a range of materials like artificial leather, thread, sequins, beads — all of which are embroidered. The combination of textures and materials adds a certain richness and depth to each piece.”

Understandably, even though his practice is collaborative with artisans embroidering his imagination on to the canvas, it is a painstaking process. For the current body of work, he worked with around 30–40 artisans over the course of almost a year. “Some pieces can take anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 hours, sometimes even more. The process is quite experimental — materials are often swapped out, compositions evolve — so it’s time-consuming, but also incredibly rewarding.”

The response to the exhibition has been overwhelming, says Khanna. “On the opening day alone, about 400 people showed up. It was completely packed. What really stayed with me was how people connected with the stories and captions beneath each piece. So many came up to me and said they’d experienced exactly what I had written. That kind of connection is exactly what I hope for,” he says.

Khanna’s last work, ‘Brain Rot’, was a critique of the lifestyles and habits of his generation. “A lot of my work deals with social media and the way it affects our lives. We live in a time where we’re constantly presenting curated, perfect versions of ourselves online—but that’s rarely the reality. I like to reflect on how this is influencing consumer culture and how so much of life today is a spectacle for the world to watch.”

Khanna’s works have been exhibited in solo shows at the LOFT, Gallery Art Exposure, Kolkata (2021); Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai (2022); India Art Fair (2023), and recently at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (2023). He is currently pursuing his MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago.

— On till August 30