The first encounter with Gunjan Chawla’s Sifr is almost disorienting. A constellation of cones, spirals, and ascetic yellows represent objects that at first look still, but seem to breathe if one watches long enough. The palette is sparse, the gesture controlled. Before coming to the India Art Fair, Sifr unfolded more expansively at Exhibit 320, where the exhibition revealed itself not as a study of zero as void, but as zero as force. Curator Anushka Rajendran positioned the null not as subtraction but as convergence, “where histories, cosmologies, and lived experience gather and dissolve.” It’s an idea that feels strikingly contemporary: in a moment shaped by political and ecological unrest, Chawla offers another proposition—attention as dialogue, process as resistance.
Rajendran calls Sifr a rebellious figure that rejects binaries and refuses to stay still. Zero becomes a vessel, capable of contradiction, unrest, multiplicity. The analogy that hovers over the exhibition is that of a whirling dervish suspended mid-turn, a body charged with energy caught in a split-second of eternity.
The material language reinforces the metaphysics. A subtractive aesthetic prevails: restraint, repetition, and primary colour—especially a radiant yellow—are used with near monastic discipline. Spirals and cones are not symbols but consequences of motion. Nothing here is expressive for the sake of expression. Instead, the process remains visible without becoming illustrative, the labour of making neither concealed nor romanticised.
Biography shadows the work without dominating it. “Growing up in a relatively slow-paced city in Punjab, I was immersed early on in local legends, folk humour, and the aftermath of Partition,” Chawla recalls. “Verses of Bulleh Shah and Shah Hussain, the sound of Gurbani, and Shakespeare read alongside local folktales… these influences formed a worldview attentive to simultaneity rather than hierarchy.” Travel across India and a move to the United States later expanded that simultaneity into a global frame, sharpened by an anthropological curiosity toward how cultures record, transmit, and remember.
The series traces its beginnings to 2016, during a residency at the Edward F Albee Foundation in Montauk, New York. There, she “used yellow pigment to activate a bare barn space”. “The choice of pigment was not incidental; colour functioned as a spatial and energetic catalyst,” Chawla says. From that barn emerged a more sustained pursuit—how matter, movement, and metaphysics might meet through material practice.
Materiality remains the spine of Sifr. Earth-rich pigments, water, organic binders, heat, and air construct a system inspired by prehistoric cave paintings. Earth is dominant—both physically and philosophically—while the interaction of the four elements suggests a fifth: ether, the space of sifr itself. Equally formative are long engagements with textiles across Gujarat, Kashmir, Bihar, and Varanasi. “Encounters with artisans, alongside my study of Japanese mineral painting and the pigments of the Bhimbetka caves, inform me of the sensitivity to labour, repetition, and transmission,” Chawla notes. These influences linger in the work not as motifs but as sediment—traces carried forward in specks of pigment.
Chawla imagines Sifr as a framework capable of change, now exploring how zero might behave when rendered through other media and vantage points. In parallel, she is developing the next iteration of Sindhu, a group exhibition that will excavate shared South Asian histories through diverse practices. Together, these gestures point toward a widening field—dialogues across media, geographies, and time—while remaining grounded in the slow, steady labour of the studio.