The Healing Voice in Arpita Singh's Art

The works of Arpita Singh—considered one of the country's leading contemporary artists—draw you in with their multi-layered narratives.

- Anindo Sen

The works of Arpita Singh—considered one of the country's leading contemporary artists—draw you in with their multi-layered narratives. Over the years, her paintings have been included in major collections across the world, and also been part of significant group shows. In 2019, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, celebrated the 87-year-old artist's practice through the retrospective, 'Six Decades of Painting'. And now, an ongoing show, Arpita Singh: Remembering at the Serpentine Gallery—her first solo at a major institution abroad—takes six decades of her work to London. The exhibition features a mix of large-scale oil paintings and small watercolours and ink drawings on paper.

Many long-term friends and collaborators like Nilima Sheikh, Geeta Kapur, Gayatri Sinha and Deepak Ananth have contributed their perspectives on her practice through essays. Art historian and curator Kapur, for instance, in the essay titled 'Iconoclast', offers two theoretical frameworks for aesthetically examining Singh's works—feminist psychoanalysis and philosophy. "Much of Arpita's work, world and ideology is history compressed into fables and allegories; what we witness are diverse imaginaries," she writes.

Singh was born in 1937 in Baranagar, Kolkata, just before World War II. The period of her early childhood was marked by famine, riots and the final thrust for independence. The artist believes that our memories transcend our lifetimes, and carry imprints of our ancestors. This retrospective brings alive those traces of memory in repetitive, frenetic bursts of expression, through repetitive motifs and symbols and questions the cycle of exploitation and erasure.