The exhibition sets up an inter-generational dialogue between two artists Arpita Singh and Shilpa Gupta on mapping spaces, memories and objects. Like the title of the exhibition 'Reflected Verses', which is taken from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s homage to her fellow writer Boris Pasternak, artworks take on new dimensions when placed in relation to each other.
Mapping remains an important element in both their works as does the emphasis on drawing to meditate the experience of space and time. On view is a recent series by Shilpa Gupta which speaks on the impossibility of mapping and measuring what is essentially organic, be it people or geography. The minimal language of Gupta is in an interesting conversation with Arpita Singh’s dense drawings and watercolors where bodies seem in constant movement, where the ground itself is brimming with an excess of elements, turned into signs, a complex web of facts, lived experiences, fictions and dreams.
There are clues that speak of real locations like Syria and Israel in both their works – the long distances artists traverse between the personal and the political, the particular and the universal. Arpita Singh carefully notes down the words ‘Everything Connected’ in one of her small drawings. The exhibition invites you to seek these connections.
