Cracks in the Wall

Ayesha Singh’s architectural sculptures and text-based art question cultural puritanism and re-present Delhi’s syncretic urban landscape

- Adwait Singh

Ayesha Singh’s solo at Delhi’s Shrine Empire Gallery It Was Never Concrete from the 23rd of August to the 28th of September conjures a strange archaeological terrain of collapsed histories, or perhaps an antique shop where a mixed bag of motley monuments from different times parley across the same shelf. The gaze meanders through an architectural maze of hybridised arches and cornices, delineated as black metal frames that break up the white space, vaguely connoting the syncretic skyline of this ancient city, finally alighting on a swinging kinetic sculpture espied through a broad vertical slit in a temporary wall.

Two zoomorphic wooden brackets, the kind one would recall from temple interiors in South India, joust and collide in an eternal merry-go-round, leaving behind a trail of dust and broken fragments. Titled Frayed Continuum, the work proffers a poetic preamble to the exhibition. The twin figures go faster and wilder as they shed their ideological weight. The torqued dynamism of the sculptures is an obvious reference to historical recycling and continuity whilst the settled remains on the floor offer a much more ambiguous reading and can variously signify constructive friction that would eventually cancel out difference, or historical casualties caught between warring ideologies. As such, this material slough is open to interpretation as exhausted cultural difference or the ruins of a desecrated past repurposed into an eclectic present. Or perhaps both at the same time.