L.
Apparitions
A solo exhibition featuring threadworks by contemporary artist Sumakshi Singh
This is a hypothetical curatorial plan created as part of my masters application process. All images are borrowed from Sumakshi Singh's personal website and rights to the featured artwork remain with the respective galleries. This is intended only for educational purposes and to test my quality of curatorial writing. I truly appreciate Sumakshi Singh's work, but do any claim any collaboration or association for this project.
Much like the nature of ghostly figures, distant memories often manifest as fading glimpses of the past. As Shirley Jackson wrote, “Most times, a ghost is a wish. It’s what people want to see.” Challenging the limits of the material plane, Sumakshi Singh's works are threaded into space and frozen in time. Skeletal fragments of her grandparents’ home, 33 Link Road, levitate and are realised through conditioned knowledge.
After the gruesome events of the Partition in 1947, her family was forced to relocate to Delhi where they built their new abode. A home she remembers bursting with energy from annual family gatherings, sleepovers, and the births and deaths of loved ones. More than an address on her official documents, the address was rooted in her notions of safety, stability and identity as her parents moved around the country. With its last resident passed on, the house now stands barren, haunting memories of those most connected to it as it awaits inevitable destruction.
Mastering embroidery as her medium, Sumakshi respects her late mother’s love for the craft and meticulously stitches back the crumbling facades of her home. A process she is unsure resurrects the house or reduces it to its bones. Detailed architectural fragments of gates, door frames and staircases suspended in the air give a sense of walking through the metaphysical plane of a place that can only be visited in memory. The ethereal house defies the laws of physics to reminisce about the lingering emotions of a time long gone. The artist questions what happens to form after it is done serving its function? Using fragility and vulnerability to her advantage, the artist explores the codependency between grief and nostalgia. The house invites to be experienced as an apparition and emotional archive which confronts the viewer’s perception of space, memory and reality.
Installation views
The structure of this gallery complements Sumakshi’s themes exploring the interplay of light and shadows. The grey walls are a stark contrast to the works crafted in overlapping white thread, highlighting their intricacy and fragility. The works would be displayed using transparent nylon threads a few centimetres ahead of the walls to cast a dramatic shadow behind them, exposing their hollow nature. Wall text denoting titles and material of each work should be set bottom left to not disrupt the flow of art. Curated as an architectural gossamer, the exhibition plays with the viewer’s depth perception and notion of materiality. It is a sensory immersive experience of walking through a spectral house that stands on the precipice of material and immaterial. The small frosted glass panels between the walls allow natural light to flow into the room and create ambient lighting, while adjustable overhead studio lights illuminate the details of the displayed work.
Upon entering the gallery, the viewer first encounters a large maze of overlapping gates (33 Link Road) acting as a threshold to cross into this transient world of the home and its memories. Another gate (Main Gate, 33 Link Road) displayed on the side gives a sense of entering a room in this ethereal house as one walks along it. The skeletal forms of the blue staircase (Untitled, fragmented staircase) on the side give structure to the living room. The October Calendar adds a domestic touch to its inhabitable interiors. Placed thoughtfully in a corner graced with natural light, the rays get entangled with the threads of the calendar and cast a perfect shadow on the walls. As a consequence, the calendar seems frozen in time and space like a flower pressed between a book. On the continuing panel is the outline of a narrow door (Garden Doors, 33 Link Road) that offers a peek into intimate moments shared in this space. This door is followed by a slightly inward corner playing a video installation of the artist’s grandparents in their living room at 33 Link Road. The video acts as the final piece of a puzzle to the translucent tapestry, allowing the viewer to connect details and visualise their surroundings in colour and form. The exhibition concludes with a golden brick wall made of gold thread hung at the back of the space. It is illuminated with only studio lights set in a shadowed corner, which makes the gold glimmer in the dark. Like the feeling of finding a tunnel of light, the brick wall discloses the strong and rich foundation of a disintegrating home. This glowing final piece contemplates the gap between a spirited history and predestined abandonment.
About the Artist
Sumakshi Singh (born 1980) is an award-winning South Asian contemporary artist, curator and educator. She graduated from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and completed her BFA from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. Her artistic practice spans a wide range of mediums, including stop-motion animation, paintings, interactive installations, embroideries and sculpture and curiously explores the boundaries of physical reality, optical illusion and emotive landscapes. She has lectured at Oxford University, the School of Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia University and mentored for residencies for the Victoria and Albert Museum.
With an incredible sense of detail achieved through a conscientious art-making process, Sumakshi’s work and writing make a powerful statement on political issues of migration and subsequent feelings of displacement. She navigates these themes with incredible emotional maturity and vulnerability while celebrating often-overlooked traditions and teachings of women in her family. Her philosophical dilemmas and experimentation with the transient lines of the material and immaterial add a surreal dimension to her work.
Selected body of work
1. 33 Link Road, 2019.
Thread 19ft x 15.6ft x 13.4ft
2. Main Gate, 33 Link Road, 2019.
Thread 74 inch x 75 inch
3. Untitled (fragmented staircase), 2023.
Thread 91 inch x 47 inch
4. October Calendar, 2021.
Thread and wire 23 inch x 25 inch
5. Garden Doors, 33 Link Road, 2019.
Thread 83 inch x 43.5 inch
6. Mapping the Memory Mandala, 2019.
Video installation
7. On Time As Memory (detail brick wall) 2024.
Synthetic zari and wire 30ft x 16ft
