Talks
Mirage in the Ether: Time, Space and Embodied Memory
Sumakshi Singh
A Blueprint of Before and After by Sumakshi Singh, 2018, Thread and Wire, Wilfrid Israel Museum of Asian Art, Israel
Sumakshi Singh’s immersive installations are an invitation into a slower rhythm of time. Viewers enter worlds of shifting perceptions, fracturing illusions and flexible relationships, to explore the bases of how we assign attention, construct meaning and perceive our realities within and without. Our everyday ‘givens’ are questioned as her work dissolves familiar forms and intimate memories into insubstantial mirages. Opaque architectural surfaces transform into ethereal skins of lace, evoking weightless veils of memory.
She plays with perspective, creating illusory environments where objects disintegrate with vantage-point. Eroding walls, peeling paint, tiny sculptures and microcosms transform the neutral white cube of the gallery into saturated membranes, making it impossible to demarcate where the background ends and “art” begins. Singh articulates a world caught in the moment between the un-manifest and manifest, substance and the insubstantial. Here, things exist in a more fluid state of potential energy, in a world not yet codified by our perceptions into the polarities of background and foreground, object and image, Art and non-art.
Join us, as Singh walks us through 22 years of her multi-disciplinary practice – discussing the roles of accidents, inspirations, sites, history, personal memory and metaphysics in art-making.
This event is in collaboration with and will be held at the Bangalore International Centre.
Sumakshi Singh
Artist
Sumakshi Singh is an artist, a curator and an educator. She has taught, mentored and lectured at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Oxford University UK, Columbia University, The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) Delhi and for the Victoria and Albert Museum among other institutions and residencies worldwide.
Her installations, illusion mappings, animations, paintings, thread-work and sculptures have been exhibited in group and solo presentations worldwide, including Saatchi Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; C24 Gallery, New York; KNMA, Delhi; Kochi Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, among other museums and galleries.
She is the first Indian artist to be commissioned by Hermès for their artist windows and is the recipient of several awards including the Asia Arts Future Game Changer award by the Asia Society in 2022 (to honour artists for their significant contributions to contemporary art), the YFLO award (from the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry) for achievement in the arts in 2019, a Zegna Grant in 2009, an Illinois Arts Council Award in 2007 (in recognition of outstanding work and commitment within the arts) and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award in 2005 (to support and encourage excellence, artistry, focus, direction, maturity, and originality in the visual arts). Her work has been on the cover of Arts Illustrated and featured in Art in America, Art Forum, Platform magazine, Take on Art, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, Younger Than Jesus – the New Museum Catalogue among other journals.
