Your currently viewing RAW Contemporary | View RAW Modern
Your currently viewing RAW Contemporary | View RAW Modern
Arpita Singh’s first institutional solo exhibition outside India, Remembering, currently on view at the Serpentine North Gallery, presents a selection of her works spanning six decades. This long-overdue survey highlights her ability to bridge the personal and the political, the mythic and the contemporary. Singh’s densely patterned canvases, filled with fragmented narratives, testify to a career spent negotiating memory, gender, and cultural inheritance. Alongside these large-scale paintings, the exhibition includes smaller watercolour and acrylic works, offering a more intimate glimpse into her evolving work.
Born in 1937 in West Bengal, Singh’s artistic trajectory has been shaped by India’s post-Partition landscape, where displacement and loss left indelible marks on collective consciousness. Her early training as a designer at the Delhi Polytechnic laid the foundation for her idiosyncratic visual language, drawing from Indian folk traditions, miniature painting, and modernist abstraction. Over time, her canvases have evolved into feverishly detailed compositions, populated by figures, often women— a dedication to complex explorations of motherhood, feminine sensuality, vulnerability, and violence.
While much of her oeuvre engages with socio-political themes, Singh’s work resists singular readings. Instead, her paintings are layered with cryptic texts, numbers, and recurring motifs that weave together personal histories and national trauma. Her palette—simultaneously joyous and ominous—echoes this duality, with candy pinks, sky blues, and mustard yellows often offset by darker undertones of blood red and murky grey.
The exhibition guide describes Singh’s practice as one that “explores the inner worlds of women, portraying them alone, in conversation with social circles, or moving across streetscapes.” Her work is imbued with a fascination for time and memory. As Singh states “Remembering’ draws from old memories from which these works emerged, whether I’m aware of it or not, there’s something happening at my core. It’s how my life flows.” This personal yet universal engagement with memory underscores her artistic vision, making her work both intimate and deeply historical.
Organised chronologically, Remembering charts Singh’s evolution from her early experiments of the 1960s and 1970s to her later, more elaborate figural works. The exhibition is dominated by large-scale oil paintings where women, soldiers, deities, and symbols of conflict coexist. Many of these works blur the line between dreamscape and battlefield, offering fragmented glimpses of an unresolved past. The show also highlights Singh’s smaller-scale watercolours and acrylic works, revealing her meticulous process and recurring thematic concerns.
Singh consistently returns to the theme of women’s resilience and existence. Figures lie in repose or stand armed, their expressions unreadable, their bodies marked with symbols of violence and power. Unlike the more overt feminist works of her contemporaries, Singh’s approach is indirect—her women are neither wholly victimized nor idealized. They are instead complex figures, imbued with intricate stories, experiences, circumstances, asserting their agency through an insistent presence.
A particularly striking aspect of the show is Singh’s engagement with mythology and the feminine divine, most notably in Devi Pistol Wali, a painting that reimagines the goddess archetype with unsettling modernity.
One of the standout works in the exhibition, Devi Pistol Wali presents a figure rooted in Hindu iconography yet unmistakably modern. While traditionally depicted wielding celestial weapons atop a lion or tiger, Singh’s Devi instead holds a pistol—an insertion of contemporary violence into an ancient symbol of feminine power.
Singh’s use of the title “Devi” is significant. In Hindu mythology, the Devi embodies both destruction and creation, acting as a protector and an avenger. In Devi Pistol Wali, this duality is heightened—the figure’s firearm, a symbol of modern aggression, complicates the traditional role of the goddess as a saviour. This substitution raises urgent questions: How has power shifted in contemporary society? What does it mean for a woman to wield violence, and on whose behalf does she fight?
Curator and writer Arushi Vats describes the figure as “a fusion of oracular power and revel spirits… embodying a reverberative transference that passes from one body to another.” The painting’s surrounding elements—fruit, birds, a turtle, and flowers—suggest a “feral world” that contrasts with the mechanical intrusion of an automobile in the background. This imagery amplifies the tension between the organic and the industrial, the timeless and the modern.
Singh’s signature palette—pinks, reds, and yellows, softened yet insistent—dominates the border, punctuated by deep blues and black accents. These colors echo the central composition while creating a sense of containment that feels at odds with the Devi’s charged presence. The floral motifs recall Mughal miniatures, where ornamental margins framed historical and divine figures, yet Singh distorts this tradition by embedding contemporary, dissonant symbols.
At the bottom border, three male faces emerge, appearing as detached spectators. Their placement in this traditionally subordinate space raises questions of agency and hierarchy. Are they passive witnesses to the Devi’s assertion of power, remnants of a past that refuses erasure, or casualties of the world she disrupts? Given Singh’s engagement with Partition history and gendered violence, these faces may also evoke nameless victims, bearing witness from the margins of history.
Another significant work in the exhibition, Searching Sita Through Torn Papers, Paper Strips and Labels (2015), offers a layered meditation on mythology, loss, and the act of remembering. The title itself signals Singh’s engagement with the Ramayana, specifically the story of Sita, wife of Rama, who was abducted by the demon king Ravana and later subjected to trials of purity. Long a site of feminist critique, Sita’s narrative is one in which her agency is repeatedly undermined by patriarchal expectations.
Singh’s visual treatment of Sita reflects this fraught history—her presence is fragmented, scattered across the canvas through torn paper, floating labels, and strips of text bearing phrases such as “Lost River Lost Memory,” “Missing,” “Unidentified,” and “Public Notice.” These textual fragments mirror the disjointed ways in which myths and histories are remembered, reshaped, and retold.
Unlike classical depictions of Sita as an idealized, singular figure, Singh renders her as a dispersed presence. She does not appear in bodily form but instead emerges through textual remnants, layered washes of color, and fragmented paper elements. This dispersion reflects how Sita’s story has been historically broken apart and reinscribed, never allowed a fixed form. Yet, despite this fragmentation, she persists. In the upper right corner, her name is repeatedly inscribed in a dense, near-patterned arrangement, evoking both an obsessive refrain and an act of erasure. Art historian Geetanjali Shree describes the work as an atlas where “Sita finds herself in Arpita’s seductive canvas of wondrous colour only to discover that the trails that lead nowhere are made up of strips of papers and labels that repeat, like a
dirge.”
By integrating fragmented text rather than a conventional figure, Singh transforms the painting into an active site of searching. Instead of offering a definitive portrayal, she forces the viewer to navigate the composition, piecing together meaning from its scattered elements—much like reconstructing a deliberately obscured history.
Ultimately, Searching Sita challenges the notion of Sita as passive by refusing to confine her to a fixed, legible image. Her dispersal across the canvas is not merely an act of erasure but one of endurance—she lingers in fragments, in traces, in the act of remembering itself. Singh’s painting does not just depict Sita’s story; it enacts it, embodying the tension between imposed absence and the resilience of cultural memory.
Singh’s work is often described as visually overwhelming, its dense layering of symbols, text, and figures verging on incoherence. Yet this very density is central to her exploration of memory, history, and gender. Her compositions reflect the fragmented, non-linear ways historical trauma is experienced and recalled. Rather than offering a straightforward narrative, Singh embraces palimpsestic complexity, where past and present, myth and reality, coexist in overlapping forms.
This approach is particularly relevant to her engagement with India’s Partition history and the lived experiences of women navigating its sociopolitical aftermath. By refusing to present a neatly packaged, easily digestible narrative, Singh enacts a form of resistance. To simplify these references for a non-Indian audience would risk erasing the depth of cultural specificity embedded in her work. Instead, she invites viewers to engage with the multiplicity of Indian experience on its own terms. Her use of text—often in Hindi or Bengali—further reinforces this localised storytelling, resisting translation as a mode of accessibility.
In an art world that often prioritizes legibility for Western audiences, Singh’s densely woven canvases assert the right to complexity. They remind us that history—especially one marked by rupture and loss—cannot be neatly contained within a single visual or narrative framework.
The art’s rejection of singular interpretation is also echoed in the curatorial choices present in Remembering. The exhibition guide, for instance, plays a crucial role in shaping how viewers engage with Singh’s work, offering multiple perspectives rather than definitive interpretations. It presents insights from fellow artists, authors, curators, and art historians, including Nilima Sheikh, Geetanjali Shree, Deepak Ananth, Gayatri Sinha, Tamsin Hong, Devika Singh, and Arushi Vats. Rather than providing a fixed reading of Singh’s work, the guide embraces ambiguity, encouraging viewers to explore Singh’s paintings on their own terms.
The exhibition’s layout reflects this open-ended curatorial philosophy. Singh’s paintings are arranged largely chronologically, with large oil works displayed in the perimeter gallery and smaller-scale pieces in the interior galleries. This spatial organization allows for a dynamic viewing experience, where Singh’s thematic preoccupations emerge gradually rather than through didactic structuring. The interplay between personal memory and historical narrative remains fluid, reinforcing Singh’s belief in the shifting nature of meaning and interpretation.
As Remembering makes clear, Singh’s contribution to contemporary art lies in her ability to collapse time and space, fusing mythology with lived experience, the personal with the collective. In doing so, she reminds us that memory is never a static entity—it is an evolving narrative, one that must be continually reexamined, redrawn, and, at times, rearmed. Her work insists on the power of ambiguity, inviting viewers to embrace the messiness of remembering.
Arpita Singh: Remembering runs at the Serpentine North Gallery from 20 March to 27 July 2025.