Monuments

Monuments: Bikaner House, New Delhi, India

Silk and nylon thread, painted steel wire

Dimensions variable (Column heights between 7 ft and 10.5 ft)

 

Monuments: Bikaner House, New Delhi, India

Silk and nylon thread, painted steel wire

Dimensions variable (Column heights between 7 ft and 10.5 ft)

Detail: Monuments  (Bikaner House, New Delhi, India)

Silk and nylon thread, painted steel wire

Monuments

Silk and nylon thread, painted steel wire

Framed Dimensions: 97″ x 31″

Shown in exhibition, Surface, Jodhpur, India

Detail: Monuments  (Jodhpur, India)

Silk and nylon thread, painted steel wire

Monuments

Silk and nylon thread, painted steel wire

Framed Dimensions: 117″ x 31″

Shown in exhibition, Surface, Jodhpur, India

Monuments:  Chicago, USA

Zari and copper wire

Dimensions variable (Column heights between 9 ft and 10.5 ft)

Part of  Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School with SAIC Painting Alumni.

Details: Monuments (Chicago, USA)

Zari and copper wire

Part of  Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School with SAIC Painting Alumni

Details: Monuments (Chicago, USA)

Zari and copper wire

Part of  Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School with SAIC Painting Alumni

Monuments: Chicago, USA

Zari and copper wire

Dimensions variable (Column heights between 9 ft and 10.5 ft)

Part of  Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School with SAIC Painting Alumni

Monuments: Chicago, USA

Zari and copper wire

Dimensions variable (Column heights between 9 ft and 10.5 ft)

Part of  Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School with SAIC Painting Alumni

Monuments: LOEWE Craft Prize special mention 2025

Zari and copper wire

104″ x 20″

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MONUMENTS

Text by Sumakshi Singh

In the human search for meaning, an age-old question resurfaces again and again: What endures in a world shaped by transience? What is worth holding onto—in our stories, our identities, our beliefs? Even as forms dissolve, people leave, homes are lost and gained, monuments erode, and time softens once-solid structures and ideas, we continue to seek permanence—in a trace that outlives form, in an essence that transcends the shape it once inhabited, as legacy, or simply as the threads that bind us to something greater than ourselves. To be human is to navigate fragility, entropy, vulnerability, and loss.

The idea of monuments is that they endure—solid and defiant against time—allowing the ideology, and voices of their creators to extend beyond their deaths. So they are typically built of solid, strong material, but to me there is something inherently vulnerable about them because they come from a human desire to outrun time, to last… In Monuments, life-size re-creations of historic columns from Delhi’s Qutab Minar Complex are embroidered onto soluble fabric.

Once part of Jain temples, these columns were later absorbed into an Islamic complex—silent witnesses to shifting histories. The Artwork renders the dense stone columns into fragile, porous membranes, their disintegrating images vulnerable to time and the erosion of history. Who’s voice lasts? What endures? Which narrative stays? The “monument” collapses into two dimensions, its fading forms speaking the language of fragmented memory—like an impression pressed between the pages of a book, suspended between presence and absence.

Another layer that the work engages with, is the way embroidery (largely women’s labour) has historically been regarded as secondary to weaving – often seen as less essential because it decorates rather than forms the fabric’s core-structure. This hierarchy mirrors the broader framing of women’s labour – as supplementary rather than foundational. Yet, once the embroidery is complete, the fabric dissolves, transforming what was once mere surface ornamentation into the essential framework holding the narrative together. This shift upends conventional hierarchies, blurring the distinction between surface and essence, primary and secondary, figure and ground—and, by extension, our historical givens, urging us to reconsider what we accept as fixed, enduring, or central to our collective narratives.