The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 142 Installation views, ‘33 Link Road’, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2019 / Image courtesy: The artist / Photograph: Anil Rane (opposite) Installation view, ‘Line, Beats and Shadows’, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, 2020–21 / Image courtesy: The artist / Photograph: Ajit Bhadoriya Installation view, ‘33 Link Road’, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2019 / Image courtesy: The artist / Photograph: Anil Rane Throughout her career, Sumakshi Singh has developed a spontaneous and responsive approach to material and space. Her practice is characterised by rigorous explorations of spatial intervention that play in the gap between conditioned knowledge and direct perception, and in the spaces between physical object and illusory experience. 1 Her works engage narratives from inner landscapes — of personal memory, metaphysical and emotive experience — as well as the history and physicality of sites. Singh’s ambitious sculptures and installations are rooted in the intimate processes of drawing and embroidery. In the artist’s recent, ongoing body of work this has focused on ‘groundless thread drawings’, which involve a laborious studio construction process that resonates with Singh’s earlier practices dedicated to materially intensive site-specific interventions. 2 Singh started developing the threading technique around 2015 after stumbling across some of her late mother’s letters. The artist felt a sudden desire to trace their words in embroidery — a technique her mother had tried to teach her as a child — using it to tie them down to the page. Ironically, once Singh finished, the words seemed to protest this fixity, and she began to remove the fabric they were on, allowing them to float in space like fragile embroidery in air. 3 Soon a skeletal archive of flowers emerged, echoing the pressed flowers from the many gardens her mother passionately created at the family’s various homes. After some experimentation, the full possibility of this medium soon emerged, resulting in immersive installations of ethereal, life-size gardens of embroidered plant forms and architectural facades suspended in space. Memories of her grandparents’ home in Delhi led to the further development of Singh’s embroidered sculptures. Her grandparents 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 understanding 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 sculptural studies in thread and shadow, evolving into a series named ‘33 Link Road’ after 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 aspects, 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 architectural forms wrap around corners and fold in on themselves, becoming delicate and malleable like the spectral collection of memories they represent. Exposed hanging threads and unravelled stitching translate the house into vulnerable fragments, caught in a process of being undone. As the body of work has developed into the 'Afterlife' series, labyrinthine installations of various objects and threaded fragments deliberately construct interplays of spatial planes and illusory perspectives. Transparent images are subtly layered, built into voids, levitate across floors and walls, or find articulation through their shadows as they hover over surfaces. In a layered thread-drawing of brick piles, Singh also extends this idea of memory to the changing urban features of her neighbourhood, where old family homes are constantly being torn down, turned temporarily into construction sites and replaced with apartment buildings. As personal archives, Singh’s thread drawings come together to reveal ghostlike 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 the fabric of time. Tarun Nagesh Endnotes 1 Sumakshi Singh in conversation with Roobina Karoda, Line, Beats & Shadows: Ayesha Sultana & Sumakshi Singh in Conversation with Roobina Karode (video), Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, streamed live 20 February 2020, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfOmfp3IMGg >, viewed 18 June 2021. 2 Singh, artist statement emailed to the author, July 2021. 3 Singh, artist statement. Sumakshi Singh Born 1980, Delhi, India Lives and works in Gurgaon, India