33 Link Road

About

Sakshi Gallery in collaboration with Exhibit 320 is delighted to present 33 Link Road: an exhibition of architectural thread-drawings, video and installation by artist Sumakshi Singh. The show previews on March 14 and will run through April 13, 2019.

Singh’s work often renders familiar form into insubstantial mirages, challenging its solidity and by extension the fixity of meaning and the intimacy of knowing that it symbolizes. She transforms form into illusions, perceptual hiccups or ethereal surfaces of lace and thread which appear to levitate like embroideries on air.

For this exhibition, viewers are invited to walk through a labyrinthine space of staggered, veil-like architectural facades based on specific places of emotional resonance for the artist. Made in thread and translucent fabric, these skeletal membranes feature life-size, embroidered architectural fragments from various homes Singh has lived in, particularly 33 Link Road – the family home built in Delhi soon after partition, when her grandparents migrated from Pakistan to India.

Singh lived in several states and countries but the idea of home was continually tethered to this one address (stated as the permanent address in all official documents until a few years ago). A site of gathering, story-telling, embroidering and knitting in the sun, family weddings and sleepovers, a room at the back where her mother was born and a room in the front where her grandfather died – this home, a container of potent memories, now lies unoccupied.

Addressing the temporal nature of both - the form and the meaning of ‘home’, the gallery transforms into an ethereal installation of transparent windows, doors, hinges, gates, staircases and brick walls, overlapping to evoke resonances, contradictions, harmonies and dissonances from certain vantage points while offering clear openings into the spaces behind from other viewing positions. Hard architectural form transforms into soft, tactile skins and the language of memory finds resonance in these veil-like, white surfaces; flattened as if preserved within the pages of book.

About the Artist:

Sumakshi Singh received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Maharaja Sayajiro University, Baroda. She has taught for five years at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lectured at Oxford University, Columbia University and The Chicago Humanities Festival among other museums and colleges.

Singh’s works has been shown at numerous prestigious venues including, MAC, Lyon, France; MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy; UCCA Beijing, China; Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA; and Kochi Biennale, India, She was awarded a Zegna Grant in 2009, an Illinois Arts Council award in 2007 and Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award in 2005. She lives and works in New Delhi.