Saanjh: Asia Society Collectible 2025
KNMA (Kiran Nadar Museum of Art), Saket, New Delhi, India
Door to no home— threads remember the threshold, air walks through the frame.
Edges fray to lace, time eats solid matter into light, memory sifts through. Paper breathes the cracks, each cut a small keepsake, held and let away.
Saanjh: Pichla Darwaza
Banana Fiber Paper sandwiched between acrylic sheets
Framed size: 32.5” x 57.5”
Detail: Saanjh (Pichla Darwaza)
Banana Fiber Paper sandwiched between acrylic sheets
Framed size: 32.5” x 57.5”
Monuments to transience- cut silhouettes of grandeur, hollowed by silence. Ghosts of permanence, threaded into paper skin, spines of old empires. Standing, not in stone, but in absence and pattern— Years gnawing at edges. A monument’s breath held in a frail exhale: what endures, dissolves.
Saanjh: Tall and short pillars
Banana Fiber Paper sandwiched between acrylic sheets
Framed size: 75” x 24” ; 85” x 24”
Saanjh: Tall pillar
Banana Fiber Paper sandwiched between acrylic sheets
Framed size: 85” x 24”
Remembrance echoes in soft descent. Each step, a fading imprint—Surfaces worn thin
by the touch of countless feet.
The afterimage, tattered, is an inheritance: a splitting of things in two— object and its immaterial twin.
And in truth, who could tell them apart?
Saanjh: Staircase
Banana Fiber Paper sandwiched between acrylic sheets
Framed size: 27” x 66.5
Veils of memory—
lines interlace into sieves, ivory, bleached by time. Blueprints of unmaking. Lingering spectres of a home: the gate, veda doors,
cracked brick and faded lattice— porous with forgetting.
Saanjh: Untitled
Banana Fiber Paper sandwiched in. museum glass
Framed size: 48” x 29.5”
Detail: Saanjh (Untitled)
Banana Fiber Paper sandwiched in. museum glass
Framed size: 48” x 29.5”
Detail: Saanjh (Untitled)
Banana Fiber Paper sandwiched in. museum glass
Framed size: 48” x 29.5”
Artist Collaboration with Mohan Verma
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SAANJH
Text by Karno Dasgupta and Sumakshi Singh
Saanjh is a creative dialogue between artists Sumakshi Singh and Mohan Kumar Verma, anchored in ideas of memory, belonging and the impermanence of time. Conceptualised and designed by Singh and crafted by Verma in banana-fibre paper using Sanjhi (papercutting) techniques, these fragile architectural sculptures reflect the ephemerality of objects, home and monuments in the face of time. The artworks are residual fragments of lived stories, collective and personal; they are mirage-like imprints of the past that transform absence into presence. They compel us to ask a simple question: how do you belong to a place that no longer exists? The answer lies in a shimmering, in-between space— between the part and whole, material and non-material, memory and residue.
Born of a year-long collaboration between artist Sumakshi Singh and Master Sanjhi artist Mohan Verma, these works emerge through a layered process of drawing, threading, scanning, stenciling, and finally, hand-cutting into banana fiber paper with fine, custom scissors. What remains are fragile architectures—delicate traces of sagging thread and embroidered memory. Rooted in the sacred Sanjhi tradition—an intricate paper-cutting practice from Mathura and Vrindavan since the 16th century—the exhibition meditates on memory, time, and entropy. Each piece becomes a dialogue between matter and the immaterial, presence and disappearance, the seen and the forgotten.
For Verma, whose rhythmic and meticulous work is shaped by a meditative daily practice, this idea finds its voice in the medium itself: in the delicate folds of the paper, in the interplay of light and shadow. Using traditional motifs, he works with Singh to push the boundaries of his practice, activating the surface of each work to reflect both the transience of time and the layered richness of memory.