In his first solo exhibition outside of India, Punjab-based artist Gurjeet Singh presents twelve soft sculptures that involve forms of rupture and repair, and the countless frictions in between.In these works, the stitch is the critical anchor, neither craft nor metaphor alone, but a gesture that uses the social wound as a site from which to suture the affective with the political.
In these sculptures, the stitch is never seamless. Threads are both taut and loose, trails of colorful beads puncture the surface, layers of fabric form a skin that is at once protective and penetrable. The surface holds the history of Singh’s craft: the gathering of materials and fragilities that refuse easy resolution.
To compose his soft sculptures, Singh has worked with discarded cloth, fragments sent by his family and friends. The accumulation of fabric is joined by the inheritance of labor, knowledge, and care, as he learned to stitch by watching his mother and sisters in their home and learned to build sculptural forms by studying the mechanics at his father’s scooter repair workshop.Embedded in this genealogy of making, the artist has been critically attuned to forms of assemblage, where surface and form oscillate in unpredictable ways.
As floral motifs migrate between different surfaces and forms, flowers appear in the titles of every work in this exhibition. Yet, like the stitch, they are not a stable category. Instead, flowers represent the complexity of being in this world: of beauty and of fragility. After all, the works engage directly with queer liberation movements across India, where images of joyful assembly are countered by threats of violence circulating through and beyond the internet. Singh’s sculptures absorb the wreckage: the spectacularization of minoritized bodies, the costs of visibility, and the intimacies that persist.Against this, Singh proposes accumulation in a different register. Layers of material are gathered and stitched together, sometimes as a form of suppression, and other times as an opening. Dense articulations of piping and embroidery reveal tensions beneath the surface, of mourning lost solidarities and exposed intimacies. This friction is translated further using cinderblock plinths upon which the works rest: the hard language of construction materials meeting the soft language of repair.The stitch, in Singh’s hands, is never fully complete. It begins and begins again as a persistent form through which softness becomes, not the absence of resistance, but its selvage.
Text by Noor Bhangu
