In Search of the Non Singular

In Search of the Non-Singular is an exhibition that brings selected works of Akbar Padamsee, one of India’s most significant artistic voices. These selected works bring to the fore the artist’s search for non-singularity through time, space, technology and self.

Central to this exhibition is the Face, which has been an intellectual haunt for many thinkers. The Levinasian interest in the face as a window into an ethics of being with the ‘other’ is well known. The face, in this collection, appears to mark Padamsee’s artistic search for the reticent and the latent. Beings, to Akbar Padamsee, appear to be constantly enmeshed in a flux of undoing and remaking.

In these particular works, made with the intention to proliferate, one may find a search for the elusive non-singular, ones that are not determined by the quality of unity promised by perhaps a zero. Instead these works are spiraling with certainty towards infinity - be it in the manner of systemic disruption as can be seen in his computer generated work, in the manner of the hazy emergence of the faces in his print works or in the manner of a resistance to be seen as seen in his later figurations.

This exhibition invites viewers to engage with Padamsee’s vision: an artistic inquiry that dissolves singularities and affirms art’s power to continually remake the world