PERMANENT ADDRESS

Sumakshi Singh

I am creating an immersive installation in which visitors will move through a labyrinth of life-sized, broken architectural fragments of a home. Crafted from delicate white thread—thinner than hair—these gossamer architectural membranes are suspended in air, reminiscent of memories drawn from the ether.

Though I have lived across states and countries, my idea of home remained tethered to 33 Link Road —a house built by my refugee grandparents in Delhi. Listed as our permanent address on official documents, it was a site of annual gatherings, stories, weddings, and sleepovers; a room at the back where my mother was born, and a room at the front where my grandfather died. 33 Link Road was considered ‘home’ not only by family, but by friends and the wider community—many of whom never officially lived there. This potent container of shared histories now stands demolished—its once-solid, sheltering surfaces dissolved into immaterial remembrance. As an homage to the afternoons spent in this home, knitting and embroidering with my grandmother, I recreated the architectural details of the house using thread.

Looking for Absolutes in a Relative World, 2025
(Shown in Co-incidence of Time and Being, Vadehra Art gallery, New Delhi)

Looking for Absolutes in A Relative World(2025, video, 43 mins) is a video which documents the artist inscribing ephemeral sentences with ink on the surface of water. Each phrase articulates a yearning for stability, meaning and permanence even as the inked words ripple, distort and dissolve. As they lose their coherence, the bleeding words surrender their capacity to contain meaning, echoing the poignant (and ultimately unattainable) pursuit of constancy in a medium (water) that inherently resists it.

On Time As Rhythmic Interference, 2024
(Shown in Co-incidence of Time and Being, Vadehra Art gallery, New Delhi)

On Time as Rhythmic Interference looks at our relationship to nature and to the rhythms of time we carry within us -primordial, elemental, slow, frantic, structured, eternally determined, measured and relative. The installation consists of a still, skeletal plant form located in the center of time’s swirling shadows.

One by one, shadows emerge from the base of the black fern, lengthening and rotating to mark different rhythms of time. The first movement of shadow is a slow, seamless succession of moments that form a smoothly skewing path, spiraling into and growing out of the center -reminiscent of shadows created by the sun on a sun-dial.

This slow, sweeping, elemental rhythm is then joined by a second movement in time, reminiscent of a ticking clock hand – an unvarying shadow that leaps from moment to measured moment, as it systematically marks every degree in the circle of light around the black fern. As time progresses, more shadows appear and the marking of time gets more structured, staccato, and mechanical. Each shadow moves faster than the one before, overlapping and overtaking each other, moving in and out of sync with each other’s rhythms, creating momentary patterns of both – harmony and dissonant asymmetry. As the pace increases, the shadows start to spiral frantically like the blades of a fan building up to a frenzied pitch, which finally causes these shadow rhythms to blur and melt into each other, leaving behind the original rhythm of the first movement.

Drawing (A Boat) on Water and Endings are Beginnings are Endings, 2024
(Shown in Khoj International Residency, Khoj Studios, New Delhi)

This series of animations and videos explore themes of temporality, fragility, collapse and regeneration in our shape-shifting constructs of home and the world.

A hand appears with an inked brush over the surface of water and attempts to draw the image of a boat. As the boat mutates and dissolves, the attempt is repeated over and over again. The insistence of the action in imprinting a form upon a field that refuses to hold it, finally results in a swirling, black cloud of dispersed ink.

A soluble-paper and thread model of a home, hovers above the surface of slowly rising waters, awaiting its inevitable dissolution into flailing strings reminiscent of roots searching for a stable hold.

A set of video triptychs feature the rising and falling of drawn and embroidered world-maps as documented by selected cartographers (list below) across the centuries. Appearing on translucent, soluble veils, the maps begin to mutate, dissolve and resolve themselves into new forms, new understandings of the world. One set of movements play with reflection, duality, lines of force, mandala-like patterns of energy and a flower-like unfurling of world images. Another set of movements play with effort and labour in the constructed world-image, that appears stitch by embroidered stitch. As one image of the world collapses another rises. Occasionally there is a total entropic breakdown of the old world-image, and a return to a smouldering, raw, unordered state of its original material (thread and ink).

Spurred by desire to find our place in the world, to have agency in navigating a potentially threatening environment, to control, acquire, conquer, grasp more of the world or simply – to understand and map “home”, we have created many images of the world. Currently on the cusp of a shifting world rhythm, (highlighted by climate change and polarising politics), many questions erupt. Will we re-imagine our stories or configure them back into the same pattern again? Will there be a shapeshifting of our ideologies, our relationship to time, to nature and to the environment? Will the old images linger on?

As Structure Dissolves, 2021
(Shown in Given Time: The Gift and its Offerings, Aicon gallery, New York)

This feels like such an unusual and incredible moment in human history. We are still on the unstable cusp of a shifting world-rhythm. Our old structures -social, political, patriarchal, environmental, medical, and economic- seem to be unravelling and this gift of time we have suddenly been given, offers a shapeshifting of our stories, identities, and ideologies.

As I contemplate the idea of the ‘gift’, ‘given time’, ‘unraveling structures and stories’ in my personal life, our family home –33 Link Road -in Delhi comes to mind. This home was built, post the partition of India, by my refugee grandparents and has been the site of innumerable family gatherings, shared stories, weddings, new births, and shared grief in deaths. The idea of ‘home ‘ has continually been tethered to this “permanent” address, which offered the gift of stability, as I shifted cities, countries and houses – but always returning, to the familiar surfaces of this home, with its whispered promise of constancy. For the first time in 70 years this home now lies empty, its last occupant (my grandmother) recently deceased.

The thread drawings and animation are of the architectural fragments from 33 Link Road, converting its solid, protective, sheltering surfaces into soft, spectral cob-webs of past memories; flattened as if preserved within the pages of a book . The familiar becomes itinerant, wandering, shape shifting as the hard architecture starts unravelling, hovering weightlessly, like an insubstantial mirage. In the stop-motion animation, a beloved door from 33 Link Road 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. As the thread resists the change in form, tugging at its identity as a door, I start to consider that- this pull and push, this fracturing of, reassembling or leaving open our stories and who we thought we were, stretch the spectrum of identity, exposing unconsidered possibilities for who we can be.

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.

CHEONGJU BIENNALE: Spanning the Void

Created for the Hyundai Translocal Series, which invited artists from the UK, Korea, and India to form new connections and pathways, this work takes the bridge as its starting point. A bridge is an architectural improbability—it leaps across the void, an architecture in air, creating a path where none existed before. Rendered in white thread and drawn from a bridge encountered near a Korean temple, the form is stripped of weight and function, sustained instead by tension, repetition, and belief. Embedded within the structure is a swastika motif, a symbol that traveled from India to Korea with the spread of Buddhism, quietly carrying histories of movement, faith, and transformation across cultures.

ASIA NOW 2025: Transience Monuments
(Shown at Monnaie de Paris in collaboration with Gallery 193 and Tak Contemporar)

The exhibition showcases embroidered sculptures reflecting on the personal and cultural architectures that shape our sense of meaning and belonging — reimagining spaces and reenacting memories. From demolished structures to fading monuments, the exhibition unfolds from the artist’s personal archive, weaving together inheritance and imagination. Singh creates life-size staircases recalling her ancestral home and columns inspired by the 13th-century Qutub Minar. As solid forms collapse and lose their significance, Singh offers a poetic reimagination of “soft monuments” that hold the weight of memories and losses, proposing repair through craft and care.

Transience Monuments invites us to reconsider what truly endures, proposing an idea of permanence that shifts from material weight to emotional resonance, existing in what is felt, remembered, and shared.

MOBILIER NATIONALE: A Blueprint of Before and After
(Shown in Ce qui se trame. Exhibition designer: Christian Louboutin)

Excerpt from text by Mayank Mansingh Kaul

This site-specific work features visual artist Sumakshi Singh’s enigmatic “gardens” of memory and light. Here they first encounter a ghost-like memory of the garden, as they observe floating, uncoloured, skeletal forms, made of thread and lace using embroidery techniques.

However, while in the embroidering act the image is literally tied down to its ground (fabric), here the artist 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.

The work responds to the presentation of historical and contemporary expressions of handmade lace in this section. This creates a conversation between what is seen as quintessentially a French medium, and one which has emerged independently out of her own practise through the act of embroidery.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Memory Is (1, 2025, 10ft X 10ft, thread) is a layered tapestry of floating words which  juxtapose sentimental clichés with scientific insights about the nature of memory. Registering more through shadows than physical presence the woven words underscore how memory, while vital to identity, is inherently unstable—prone to distortion and reinterpretation. Alive and mutable, it continuously reshapes the past, and by extension- keeps reframing our understanding of who we are, where we stand and where we are going. Translation through memory involves inevitable losses or additions raising the question whether memory serves as a reliable anchor for identity or an ever-shifting lens through which we construct meaning.

Looking for Absolutes in A Relative World (2025, video, 43 mins) is a video which documents the artist inscribing ephemeral sentences with ink on the surface of water. Each phrase articulates a yearning for stability, meaning and permanence even as the inked words ripple, distort and dissolve. As they lose their coherence, the bleeding words surrender their capacity to contain meaning, echoing the poignant (and ultimately unattainable) pursuit of constancy in a medium (water) that inherently resists it.

LIGHT SONG

When invited to participate in this show “Prussian Blue”,  I was most drawn to the light-sensitive quality of this pigment, which enabled the invention of Architectural Blueprints. A variation on the Blueprint process, “Cyanotype” involves coating the paper, thread or fabric with a mixture of chemicals, which when exposed to sunlight  generate a deep Prussian blue. Areas of the image which one wants to retain as the white of the original surface are blocked from receiving the sunlight.

This series uses light as both – as subject matter and as a key material ingredient which creates images (or blueprints) of itself.  In Light Song 1 each thread (resembling a light ray) is individually coated with Cyanotype chemicals and exposed to sunlight. In Light Song 2 and 3, images of light and shadow (registered on a wall and floor by rays coming in through window panes) are created by exposing and shielding parts of the coated paper surfaces/ silk threads from sunlight. They play with the poetic paradox that images of light emerge by denying light to the very areas which articulate it.

SPECTERS OF BELONGING

text by Snehal Tambulwadikar Khedkar

Museums hold together our histories. Fragments of art and culture are brought together, acquired or donated and contextualised in this tertiary space. The architecture and context are conjectural to individual objects and even more alien when grouped together. The existence of their original spatiality lurks around like a subtle memory, which Sumakshi weaves together in her works. Sumakshi sees these lost spaces in her mind, and gathers their traces in her architectural thread drawings.

Indian aesthetics talks about inter-connectivity of all art forms, which culminates in temples of all religions. Sculptures are an integral part of architecture, and have rhythm and balance of dance and continuity and repetition of musical compositions. Sumakshi finding of the subconscious traces of architectural forms in museum sculptures seems natural as these are uprooted from their aesthetical ecosystem. With delicate dexterity Sumakshi weaves the lost environment of these sculptures, placing the columns, doorways with every detail. These works seem like the skeletal fossils of flowers or leaves we preserve in diary pages, long forgotten associations which are beautiful and painful, having eternal existence yet lost in time.

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.

Text by curator: Tarun Nagesh

Throughout her career, Sumakshi Singh has developed a spontaneous and responsive approach to both materials and space. Her rigorous explorations of spatial interventions play in the gap between conditioned knowledge and direct perception, often reversing roles or stretching open the space between background and foreground, micro and macro, between physical object and illusory experience. Her practice engages narratives from inner landscapes – of personal memory, metaphysical and emotive experience- as well as the history and physicality of the site.

Singh’s ambitious sculptural and installation practice is rooted in the intimate processes of drawing, painting, collaging, carving and embroidery. In the artist’s recent/ ongoing body of work, this has focused on ‘groundless thread drawings’. These involve a laborious, studio construction and deconstruction process that bears resonance to her earlier practices dedicated to materially intensive, site-specific interventions.

Singh started developing the threading technique around 2015 after stumbling across some of her late mother’s letters. She felt a sudden desire to trace the words in embroidery – a practice, her mother had tried to teach her as a child – using it as a way to really tie the words down to the page. Ironically, once she finished the embroidered letter, the words seemed to protest this fixity, this tying down. She began to remove the fabric that they were on, allowing them to float in space like a fragile embroidery on air. Soon a skeletal archive of flowers and plants emerged, echoing the pressed flowers from the many gardens her mother had passionately created in the various homes the family lived in, as they moved around the country. After a year of experimentation with techniques, the full possibility of this medium began to come to surface, resulting in immersive installations of ethereal, life-size gardens of embroidered plant forms and architectural facades suspended in space.

Family memories of the artist’s grandparents’ home in Delhi led to the further development of Singh’s thread-based sculptures and drawings. Her grandparents had arrived in Delhi, as refugees after the Partition of India and gradually built the family home. As a child Singh continually moved across the country, and so the old house in Delhi became her only sense of a constant home, with its familiar surfaces, objects, stories and smells. After its long history of hosting and serving the family, the home now lies abandoned.

The architectural features of the house have now become the focus of gossamer studies in thread and shadow, evolving into a series entitled ‘33 Link Road’, taking its name for the address of the old family home. Beginning with a series of the different gates at the entry to the house and developing into threaded windows, doors, staircases and architectural facades, the series captures the house frozen in time like a flower pressed between the pages of a book. Lightly strung across walls or stretched like veils in space, the insubstantial architectural forms wrap around corners and fold in on themselves, delicate and malleable like the spectral collection of memories they represent. Exposed, hanging threads and unravelled stitching translate the house into vulnerable images/fragments of home, caught in the process of being undone.

As the body of works has developed, labyrinthine installations of various objects and threaded fragments, deliberately construct interplays of spatial planes and illusory perspectives. These transparent images built into voids, levitate across floors and walls in subtle layering or find articulation through their shadows as they hover above the wall surface.

In the layered thread-drawings of brick piles, Singh also extends this idea of memory to the changing face of her neighbourhood, where old family homes are constantly being torn down, turned temporarily into construction sites and replaced with condos.

As archives of memory, the thread drawings come together to reveal ghost-like spaces where rigid architectures translate into soft veils of memory. While the forms become skeletal, fragile and adaptable, they evoke the evasive desire of the artist to tie down these fading memories, to stitch them permanently in fabric of time.