First published on 24 October 2025
If I were to look back, I first really engaged with Anjum Singh’s practice when I facilitated a conversation between her and Manisha Parekh for the art magazine Art India in 2000. It was a heart-to-heart discussion between two friends and peers, that covered what it meant to be children of well-known artists, their work and recent shows, the use of colour and material, and the challenges they were grappling with at the time.
The following year, I remember gravitating to Anjum’s installation Cola Bloom at the Khoj workshop in Modinagar. Her pop sensibility and love for bright, warm colours found expression in the work fashioned out of empty Coke bottles and resembling a gigantic pink flower. I was struck by how she used the inorganic to mimic the organic, and how the artificial doubled up as a substitute for the natural.
As Ella Datta also touches on in a recent book on Singh, published by Talwar Gallery and the Raza Foundation, there was a spirit of experimentation with materials that defined Anjum’s generation. Post liberalization in the early 1990s, Indian artists found it easier to travel abroad and were exposed to the possibilities of different media. Anjum admired the diversity of materials and the notion of fragility in the renowned artist Eva Hesse’s work, and consciously attempted to emulate her ability to oscillate between painting, drawing and sculpture.
In 2007, when I was writing the catalogue essay for a two-person show by Anjum and Sheila Makhijani, I realized that the metropolis was a favourite muse for Anjum. As an artist, she was attracted not so much by its glitz and glamour, but its seamier, squalid side. She portrayed a city gasping for breath, its arteries and veins slowly but insidiously poisoned by noxious fumes, its ground water depleted and unfit for human consumption.
Anjum’s works were actually an elegy to the city. In “Deconstructing my City,” the artist turned to a series of skirmishes that had broken out over space across the national capital. In their effort to portray a new face of modern India, city planners had opted for a sterile urban paradigm, demolishing slums and “illegal constructions” and dispossessing its very inhabitants. Engaging with the social upheaval she saw around her, Anjum displayed the uncanny ability to distil these events into images. But despite being telling social commentaries, her works were neither didactic nor preachy.
Two years later, her show at Vadehra Art Gallery, titled All that Glitters is Litter, depicted a world that had gone all plastic and pop. Here again, the natural had given way to the synthetic, mimicking the urban jungle that is the hallmark of all megapolises today. In her work “Buzz,” bright and shiny oblong magnets were clustered together to imitate the gigantic hives that bees build within monuments or buildings, due to shrinking natural habitat. This, perhaps, was also a reflection of the industrious workers who are the life force of every city, their toil and tenacity harnessed to transform the dreams of urban planners.
It was the “lack of an alternate plan” that Anjum bemoaned in her exhibition. She questioned the “India Shining” campaign, pointing to the utter disregard shown to public spaces by residents. Nowhere was this more evident than in her canvas works “Spit” and “Spat,” where she drew the contours of the city, besmirched and smeared with cigarette stubs and beetel nut stains. The artist wanted to probe if people behaved this way, because they felt no stake in the transformation taking place around them.
In the run up to the Commonwealth Games, trees were lopped off and uprooted, stripping the capital of its green cover. It is in this context that a work like “Minim” needs to be placed and read as a satire for our times. Singh created the atmosphere of an enchanted forest, using industrial materials like aluminium and Perspex. In this futuristic landscape, the transition of the organic to the inorganic felt complete, with avarice paving the path for artifice.
In a cheeky aside, Anjum also decided to aestheticize the detritus of the city, making a pile of garbage posh and pretty by sanitizing it. While writing my review on the show, I remember drawing a parallel between her and artist Vivan Sundaram, who was also exploring the aesthetics of waste at the time. Unlike Vivan, who physically transported waste into the gallery space, Anjum had created her own version of garbage with bright bits of acrylic. By showing us how waste can mimic high art and high art can degenerate into waste, Vivan had offered us new paradigms for our engagement with the city. Anjum concentrated instead on turning all that glittered into litter. In her conversation with Manisha Parekh, she said, “I do not think I am directly making any social statement, but I am conscious of living in a certain environment with which my work is definitely connected.”
Another show was held at Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi, the following year from December 2010 to January 2011. Culling a sentence from one of John Updike’s short stories, Anjum called this set of works “The Skin Remembers.” Elaborating on the title, she told me: “There was a particular story about an old man and I came across this line ‘the skin remembers.’ I often jot down sentences that I like when I am reading something. I have been working on the surface of Delhi and I thought it was very apt.” Given that the skin often bears marks of events that have long since faded from memory, Anjum used it as a metaphor for the city, tracing the changes inflicted on the metropolis with the passage of time.
In a series of small, intimate works on iron sheets, she employed ball bearings, magnets and pins to give them a three-dimensionality. To inject a sense of location, she used ovoid and square paper stickers, depicting maps of cities and continents. While her works appeared to be devoid of human figures, she evoked human presence with her rendition of internal organs like the heart or lungs, linking them with painted acrylic lines to the arteries of the city.
The pop sensibility that marked Anjum’s earlier practice was apparently on its way out -- the only work that was a nod in this direction was “Kiss Me Quick,” with its cluster of aluminium lips. With this solo, Anjum also seemed to have resolved the teething problems she had earlier encountered with industrial materials.
I will now jump to 2019, when Anjum’s much-anticipated solo show, “I am Still Here,” was organized at Talwar Gallery, New Delhi. It was all the more poignant because Anjum had a near brush with death in the summer of 2019. Earlier in 2015, she had been diagnosed with cancer, while her show “Masquerade” was on at Talwar Gallery’s New York branch, and this marked her first solo in India in almost a decade.
As always, Anjum appeared radiant, and if she was in pain, she never wore it on her sleeve. But beneath the veneer of a triumphant and joyful comeback, there were undertones of physical trauma. Here was clearly a vivacious spirit, trapped in a failing body.
Some weeks later, Sheila Makhijani asked me if I was interested in doing a gallery walk-through with Anjum. I jumped at the chance to learn more about the thought processes that fed into what would ultimately be Anjum’s swan song.
It must be said that Anjum never consciously wanted to make her ill health the subject of her work. This transpired organically. The onset of her illness in 2014 necessitated countless trips to hospitals both in India and the US. These experiences took form on paper and canvas, not in a manner that was morbid, but one that exuded a fragile beauty, holding up the frailties of the flesh to scrutiny.
This was especially evident in her watercolours on paper, like the three-part Bleed Bled Blood Red, where smudges of colour mimicked bodily secretions. In one, the numbers below the stains appeared to mark the march of days, while in another they were boxed in to form an irregular grid, with some of the squares bearing words like “alkaline,” “mineral,” and even “Singh.” The insertion of the artist’s name completed the objectification of her body, reducing it to a subject of cold and clinical examination. It was, perhaps, telling that in the exhibition the artist presented parts of the human body never made whole.
While brooding blocks of graphite black seemed to have been a more recent inclusion in her work, gravitating to reds and pinks came naturally to her. In the aforementioned conversation with Manisha, she said: “I know that if something is not working, I can use red to make it work.” One could see that she had moved on since then, imbuing colour with an intentionality and significance. Red later came to signify not just celebration and passion, but also blood and tears.
Through all her trials and tribulations, Anjum never lost her sense of playfulness, poking fun at her internal bodily functions with her quirky forms. But equally, there was a new-found desire to let go, to abandon herself to accident, as was evident in the spreading stains in her watercolours. Her innate love for structure, as seen in earlier works, was now increasingly juxtaposed with a certain fluidity. As Anjum realized through the course of her illness, not everything could be pre-determined or predicted. You could be here today and gone tomorrow.
Meera Menezes is a Delhi-based art writer and independent curator.