In her recently concluded Delhi exhibition ‘What Remains Awake: Dream, Depth, and the Fourth’, artist Sonika Agarwal turns inward — toward the quiet spaces between waking and sleep, thought and stillness. “I was drawn to the question: when everything falls asleep, what remains awake?” she says.
The exhibition draws from the Indic understanding of consciousness — Jagrat (waking), Swapna (dream), Sushupti (deep sleep), and Turiya, the fourth state that underlies and witnesses them all. Rather than treating these as abstract philosophical ideas, Agarwal approaches them as experiences. “These states are not references I illustrate literally,” she explains. “They function more like an inner grammar that quietly structures my work.
Her artistic journey spans 17 years and has evolved steadily over time. She began with painting, using colour and form to explore emotion and the inner lives of women. “That questioning gradually became more personal: “Who am I?,” she says.
Her practice is also shaped by her multiple identities as a woman. “My personal experiences and my multiple roles as a woman are not separate from my artistic process — they are the ground from which it grows,” she says.
Turning inward she began exploring memory, the human mind, and states of consciousness. Drawing from philosophy and lived experience, her work began to shift from representation to experience. “I felt the need for the viewer to enter the work rather than simply look at it,” she notes. Sculpture and installation became central to her practice, with light emerging as an important material.
In earlier installations such as ‘Vasana – The Architecture of Desires’, she explored desire and memory as living structures. In ‘What Remains Awake’, that exploration deepens. Consciousness is presented not as theory, but as something spatial and embodied.
While her paintings, shifts in density, colour, and rhythm evoke the movement between waking, dreaming, and deep rest; her sculptures, the ideas take physical form. Brain-like structures, roots, and womb-like volumes suggest the tension between thought and instinct. “The physicality of sculpture grounds Jagrat,” she explains, “while inner illumination and concealed spaces hint at Swapna and Sushupti.” The viewer encounters not just an object, but a slowed bodily awareness.
Ultimately, What Remains Awake is not an exhibition meant to be rushed. She wants visitors to notice how their bodies respond — how breath shifts, how light and silence begin to work on them. “I hope viewers engage with the work slowly — without the pressure to immediately understand or interpret it,” she says. “It asks for presence.”