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Afterlife

Solo Exhibition, Exhibit 320, Delhi

Afterlife: 50 sec video walk through

Thread installations, animations and framed drawings.

 

Afterlife (Phantoms and Shadows)

Thread and steel frame

dimensions variable.

Afterlife (Phantoms and Shadows)

Thread and steel frame

dimensions variable.

Detail: Afterlife (Phantoms and Shadows)

Thread and steel frame

dimensions variable.

Process: Afterlife (Phantoms and Shadows)

Thread and steel frame

dimensions variable.

Afterlife (Phantoms and Shadows)

Thread and steel frame

dimensions variable.

The Unraveling Image

Threads pinned 1″ away from wall. Colours inspired by fading blueprints.

22ft X 8ft (size can vary)

 

Detail: The Unraveling Image

Threads pinned 1″ away from wall. Colours inspired by fading blueprints.

 

The Unraveling Image

Threads pinned 1″ away from wall. Colours inspired by fading blueprints.

22ft X 8ft (size can vary)

Process: The Unraveling Image

 

The Unraveling Image

Threads pinned 1″ away from wall. Colours inspired by fading blueprints.

22ft X 8ft (size can vary)

Installation view

Untitled (Fragmented Spiral Staircase)

Threads of varying thicknesses

91″ X 47″

84″ X 33″

59″ X 49″

 

Untitled (stair fragment)

Thread and Steel frame. Colours inspired by fading blueprints.

38″ X 49″

Installation view

Detail: Untitled (staircase to the First floor)

thread

 

Untitled ((staircase to the First floor)

thread

Approximate volume of the space: 10ft X 10ft X 10ft

Installation view

Entropy (veda doors)

Thread in the colours of fading blueprints.

Approximately : 7 ft X 12 ft

The form of the Veda doors starts dense and gets increasingly rarer, finally unraveling into 3 strings.

Untitled (corner brick fragment)

thread

135″ X 19″

Detail: Entropy (veda doors)

Thread in the colours of fading blueprints.

Approximately : 7 ft X 12 ft

The form of the Veda doors starts dense and gets increasingly rarer, finally unraveling into 3 strings.

Entropy (veda doors)

Thread in the colours of fading blueprints.

Approximately : 7 ft X 12 ft

The form of the Veda doors starts dense and gets increasingly rarer, finally unraveling into 3 strings.

Installation view:

Brick wall : 77″ X 47″,

Stair Fragment 38″ X 49″

and Staircase to the First Floor

 

 

Installation view with

Brick wall : 77″ X 47″

and

As Structure Dissolves: 9 min, 22 secs

stop motion animation projected on translucent fabric.

Still from : As Structure Dissolves

stop motion animation projected on translucent fabric.

9 min, 22 secs

A door from the artist’s (now empty) family home, is constructed stitch by embroidered stitch. Ultimately the form mutates, fragments and dissolves back into its original material (thread), swirling like a galactic phenomenon, offering back into the universe its temporal gift of form, to be assimilated into the material of stars.

Installation view

Mural of  Surya and his Seven Horses (with one missing)

thread

92″ X 54″

Details: Mural of  Surya and his Seven Horses (with one missing)

thread

92″ X 54″

Installation view

Untitled (white stair and shadow)

white thread drawing and its shadow

67.5″ X 36″

Untitled (white bricks and shadow)

white thread drawing and its shadow

108″ X 22″

Process: The Unraveling Image

Process: The Unraveling Image

Process: The Unraveling Image

Process: As Structrure Dissolves

Fragmented, unraveling, weightless replicas of architectural elements from the artist’s (now unoccupied) family home in exact life-size dimensions.

Read about this project

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Afterlife: text by Najrin Islam

In her artistic oeuvre, Sumakshi Singh reconfigures the familiar axes of experience by drawing illusions in line and trace. The concrete constitution of architectural facades dissolves into textile ephemera, creating a mise-en-scene of spectral architectonics. What happens to a place after its inhabitants are gone? What happens to form after it’s done serving its function? In Afterlife, Singh explores loss as a gradient, creating a series of impressionist images that linger long after the immediate has perished.

Uninhabitable, the delicate textile facades offer themselves as experiential maps of the artist’s ancestral home. Located on 33 Link Road, Delhi, the house was built by her now-deceased grandparents after they migrated to India post the 1947 Partition. Listed as her “permanent address” in all official documents, this family home was the site of innumerable gatherings, sleepovers, shared stories, births, weddings, and deaths. Currently unoccupied, the building stands as a phantom of a potent past. Singh started to look anew at its constituent objects and architecture, replicating them carefully with dimensional exactitude in thread, in homage to her grandmother’s love of embroidery. Mounted to scale in the gallery, the house breathes through its simulation, attesting to an intense artistic need for perusal, absorption, and ultimately, release.

Gossamer threads become porous membranes, as structures levitate in defiance of gravity. Shadows are lent substance through textile doubling, while austere walls waft like delicate scaffold. This house rejects the laws of physics, as foreground and background dissipate in their normative polarities; the architecture is experienced as an apparition. In contrast to Singh’s installations in pre- Covid times, these works reveal a distinct sense of unravelling. Departing from the defined and measured contours of her earlier hand, Singh’s concentrated experience of vulnerability, fear, and grieving during the pervasive malaise over the past two years percolated into her artistic sensibility. So while the essence of the form remains intact, the material betrays a rawness. The hand becomes a conspicuous trail and inscription, driven by the urge to make architectural sense of its own predicament. The threadwork on display then becomes, in Singh’s words, a “transitional tapestry”, situated in the collisions of time, space, and memory.

Through re-creation in embroidery, the ethereal house becomes a sentient archive. Memory is externalised on a material placeholder in thread, as the gates and doorways stand as spectres of their referents in 33 Link Road. Singh’s abode pulsates with her pain at the filial loss, which activates the space through sensorial transfer. Is the house slowly taking shape through these laborious exercises? Or is it liquefying to its bare essential? Drawn from memory and index, and relocated onto textile palimpsests, the house is both genesis and residue. Situated between the manifest and the “un-manifest”, it floats as a quiet reminder of thread’s illimitable adaptability to the length and weight of longing.