A conversation with Indian artist Sumakshi Singh, who transforms memories, breath, and architectural imagery into objects and installations of thread and light.
How to See the Forgotten: Meeting Sumakshi Singh
- Date:
- 5 Oct 2025,
14:00–15:30
- Age restrictions
- 12+
Moderator
Artem Timonov is a curator of exhibition programmes at
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Sumakshi Singh’s works, from microscopic drawings on walls to large-scale installations, invite viewers to recalibrate their perception, to learn to see art in an accidental crack, and become full co-authors of the work. Many attest that after experiencing visiting Sumakshi’s exhibitions it can be difficult to “switch off this way of seeing.”
Sumakshi Singh in the space of her solo exhibition Afterlife at Exhibit 320 Gallery. Delhi, 2023. Photo: Ajit.
It is really the viewer’s own mind and their own boundaries that allow something and give it permission to be part of the art experience or not.
—Sumakshi Singh
The artist explores how memory functions and how the invisible can be materialised, working at the intersection of craft, conceptualism, and phenomenology. In her early micro-interventions, Singh disrupted the sterility of the “white cube” of the gallery by leaving barely perceptible traces on walls and floors. She later moved on to creating intricate installations that balance on the edge between the tangible and the illusory—where, at a certain vantage point, the viewer can piece together a complete image from abstraction. In recent years, as a way of grappling with personal loss, she has developed a unique technique of “thread drawings without a base,” embroidering on dissolvable fabric. Out of this practice emerged her renowned series in which her childhood home and ancient Indian monuments are reimagined as levitating structures.
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, the Curatorial Manager of Asian and Pacific Art at QAGOMA
There’s just this sort of feeling—a bit dissonant, or a little bit of grief, or a little bit raw, and I can’t even name what the feeling is. But then I go into the studio, and there will be an impulse to pick up some material and follow that impulse because I’ve learned to trust this voice.
— Sumakshi Singh
At the meeting, we will discuss whether it is possible to turn a personal story into a universal statement, and the burden of loss into a weightless image.
Artist
Sumakshi Singh (b. 1980) graduated from the Maharaja Sayajirao University (India) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA). She has lectured at Oxford and Columbia universities. Her work has received the Asia Arts Future Game Changer Award (2022) and a Special Mention at the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize (2025). Singh’s pieces have been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, and the Kochi Biennale.
