A fence can both divide and connect — designating a boundary while also encouraging crossings. Built on this idea is ‘Open Fences’, a group exhibition currently on view at Gallery XXL, bringing together six artists whose works explore themes of memory and space that influence human experience.
Featuring works by Bikash Chandra Senapati, Kapil Jangid, Sabiha Dohadwala, Sowat, Suruchi Choksi and Tomislav Topić, the exhibition will run till May 16. Through diverse mediums — from textile and concrete to painting and installation — the show reflects on what it means to inhabit spaces that are at once divided and deeply interconnected.
Woven shadows
An engagement with memory and material can be seen in the works of Sabiha Dohadwala. Drawing inspiration from her grandmother’s crochet and lace work, she says she started thinking about the kind of labour that often goes unnoticed. “My grandmother had so much technical knowledge, but it was always seen as something ordinary.” Her works combine scanned images of handcrafted textiles with photographs of architectural elements like window grills. She associates these motifs with spaces from her childhood. These grids, once common in homes, become symbols of both protection and separation, she notes.
“There’s always this screen between inside and outside,” she explains. “It’s a point of access, but also a barrier.”
Using a TC2 jacquard loom — a computer-sequenced loom — Dohadwala turns digital images to woven pieces. The process, though aided by technology, is manual and time-intensive, requiring precision, patience and an understanding of material.
An urban depiction
For Kapil Jangid, his works draw from his parents' experience of migrating from a small Rajasthan village to the industrial town of Bajwa in Gujarat. Jangid later moved to Vadodara for his studies and now lives in Delhi. This constant movement across places, along with the nostalgia it carries, is especially reflected in the artist's practice. “I’ve seen these terrazzo tiles in my home while growing up,” he says talking of his material. “I think about how we connect to our homes and what happens to that connection when we migrate.”
Jangid’s ‘Urban Facades’ series highlights this tension. His architectural surfaces represent the chaotic, rapid growth of Indian cities. The process involves digital image mapping, hand-cut moulds, and pigmented concrete casting. Hence, each piece is as tactile as it is conceptual.
“Cities in India are growing very fast, but without enough infrastructure,” he notes. “There’s always this contrast between planned and unplanned spaces. That’s something I’m trying to understand through my work.”
Suruchi Choksi of Mumbai explores Buddhist thought through her works, part of her ongoing ‘Zero Plus Anything is a World’ series, to contemplate impermanence, interconnection, and the idea of shunyata, or emptiness. “These works are about seeing how nothing exists in isolation,” she explains. “Everything arises in relation to something else.” Her mediums are acrylic, pastel and ink.
“My art practice is like a fellowship of silence,” she says. “By the time I begin making the work, the emotional charge has already settled. What remains is a quieter expression.” In her ink-based series ‘What Shifts, What Follows’, Choksi physically punctures paper and allows ink to move through it, creating splotches of black ink across the white sheet. The patterned structure, thus, draws the viewer into a sense of introspection.
Of abstract designs
The exhibition also brings together distinct approaches by the other artists. Bikash Chandra Senapati uses drawing and printmaking to explore memory and transition, creating landscapes inspired from rural and urban settings. On the other hand, Sowat’s artworks draw from graffiti and calligraphic traditions; letters and calligraphic designs are dissolved into abstract forms on large canvases.
Berlin-based Tomislav Topić’s works, made during his Goa residency, are all about colour. The centrepiece is an installation appearing to explore themes of transparency and light, utilising a series of mesh panels suspended from a circular metal armature. The rainbow mesh creates an installation where coloured mist appears diffused in the air.
Moving through works that revolve around translucence, memory and immediacy, the exhibition suggests that boundaries are never fixed; they are porous, constantly negotiated, and shared.