Artist Shambhavi Singh’s new work is a dialogue with the farmer and his land

As Singh helps decipher the title and concept of the show, “Reaper’s Melody”, she says, “When you cross roads from the city into a village you hear a song, an echo towards the horizon, that farmers sing in their paddy fields. This melody is not always pleasant, and becomes a medium for them to release their own pain.”

Among the12 new paintings, paper pulp works and sculptural installations on display, the basement of the gallery houses her installation, where a number of sickles lie on the ground, left for no use and with no takers. “In the name of development, lands are being occupied and huge concrete buildings are coming up. It is as if these sickles are surrendering and leaving behind their memories of the field,” says Singh. Enlarged canvases spread across an entire wall bear thumbprints, in Singh’s Girvee Lal. These thumbprints belong to farmers, who keep mortgaging their lands all their life.

Apart from her works being exhibited in South Africa, Australia, and The Netherlands, Singh’s career graph boasts of an installation that was procured by Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2012 to be placed alongside the works of Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Takashi Murakami.

Her installation Ghar Andar Bahar brings home the theme of the show. Red and yellow hues pasted on the wall, made from cotton pulp resemble the mud houses that farmers live in. She says, “Their clay homes are like shrines. They live with it and die with it. Their way of living inside and outside is the same; with floods, not only are their crops destroyed but so are their homes.”

The exhibition is on till January 3 at Talwar Gallery, C-84, Neeti Bagh. Contact: 46050307