In A Blueprint of Before and After- the viewer is invited to walk through Sumakshi Singh’s enigmatic “gardens” of memory and light. Here he/ she first encounters a ghost-like memory of the garden, walking through floating, white, skeletal forms, made of thread and lace using traditional embroidery techniques. However, while in the embroidering act the image is literally tied down to its ground (fabric), here Singh removes the base, leaving the image itself levitating and permeated with space like an embroidery on air. These baseless thread sketches are reduced to their flat, white essence creating the blueprint of a Garden – in the process of becoming or perhaps recorded as the aftermath of a garden that once existed.
In Singh’s works, material is absent and yet always present. The sketch itself – whether using thread or animation – is located at the center of the space as a tender structural foundation, as a deceptive memory of traditions and life. The viewers become integral to the work with their bodies used as imaginary platforms for the screenings and the embroidery in reflection and in space. The installation’s plants lose their internal properties. They are embroidered and unfastened, floating in the air, appearing and disappearing with a dreamlike quality.
Singh directs us to slow down and observe the tiny details often unobserved by the eye, such as the uninvited wild grass peeking through floor tiles, refusing to surrender to the human desire to manicure and control nature. She mixes the personal and local, the images and their reflections, and undermines our common perceptions and fixed notions of bracketing reality, suggesting a more flexible view, where change is the most common element.
2023:
KNMA (Kiran Nadar Museum of Art), Noida, India
Exhibit 320, Delhi, India
CSMVS museum, Mumbai, India
2022:
Asia Pacific Triennial QAGOMA
2021:
Aicon Contemporary, New York & 1X1 Art Gallery, Dubai
2020:
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi
2019:
Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, India
Hermès, The Chanakya, New Delhi
2019-current:
Architectural Thread Drawings
2018:
Wilfrid Israel Museum, Israel
Belgrade Biennale/ 58th October Salon, Serbia
2017:
Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum
India Art Fair/ FOCUS
C24 Gallery, New York, USA
2016:
Exhibit 320, New Delhi, India
Saatchi Gallery, London, UK & Art Houz, Chennai, India
2015-current:
Botanical Thread Drawings & Vitrines