to see a world in a grain of sand ... is Shambhavi Singh's first solo exhibition in the Middle East.
Raised principally in an agricultural family, it is the rural landscape, the earth, the farmer, and their implements that find form in her practice. Though deeply poetic, there is an active engagement between humans and nature - from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
Shambhavi appropriates, distorts, and symbolically creates surfaces and patterns within nature where the sickle, used primarily for harvesting or reaping, is magnified in scale not just as an implement but a metaphor. It becomes a 'point of entry', or where a thousand sickles and the shadows create and multiply to become birds in flight; the woven sieves become recollections of hidden narratives of those women at work - husking the grain... It is that fluidity of life in opposition to any attempt at a fixed reading where Singh merges the perceptual and conceptual knowledge in ever-changing forms.
Her art is both a space for critical practice and a poetic archive - for 'visual' eco-poetics, of nurturing and memory, dissonance and alienation in the face of insurmountable environmental challenges to which she bears witness in her experiential aesthetics and mixed-media sculptural works.
