Memory, for Arpita Singh, is neither a ghost nor a guest—it’s a collaborator. In Arpita Singh: Remembering, now on view at London’s Serpentine Galleries, time becomes texture. The exhibition unfurls like a densely embroidered sari: tangled in personal threads, political borders, and the saturated pigments of a life steeped in storytelling.

This is Singh’s first institutional solo show outside India—a milestone long overdue. At 88, she has summoned six decades of creative momentum into a chorus of 165 works, each a mnemonic fragment, a whispered tale, or a half-remembered dream. If history has often overlooked women painters from South Asia, Singh has repainted the record in her own chromatic script.

Art as Archive, Body as Cartography

To step into Singh’s visual universe is to step sideways through history. Her canvases are populated by women—powerful, weary, weaponized, adorned—bearing the residue of myth and modernity in equal measure. In Devi Pistol Wali (1990), we encounter the Hindu goddess Devi, armed not only with divine limbs but also a pistol. The goddess adjusts her sari with one hand while leveling a firearm with another, a disarming gesture that blurs ritual with resistance.

Framed by florals like a Mughal miniature gone rogue, the painting stages a visual coup: woman as deity, protector, and avenger. It’s less mythology retold than mythology reloaded—Singh takes the sacred and lets it simmer in the heat of contemporary discontent.

The Serpentine’s wall text describes this approach as a “conjuring of the complexities of women navigating public spaces.” But Singh doesn’t illustrate those complexities; she traps them, turns them loose, and lets them multiply across canvas, ink, and pigment.

Cities Remembered, Disremembered

In My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising (2005), Singh’s brush becomes a compass warped by nostalgia. This sprawling work is part cartographic fever dream, part psychological map. Lovers gaze over an impossible city—likely New Delhi—where streets coil like intestines, airplanes swarm the sky, and astrological signs float with cryptic intent.

It’s a landscape neither fictional nor factual, a version of memory you can never quite return to. Landmarks like the Red Fort and Jantar Mantar are rendered familiar yet skewed, like monuments seen in dreams just before waking. It’s not disorientation for its own sake; it’s the visual language of lived memory: imprecise, overwhelming, intimate.

As Singh herself told Hans Ulrich Obrist in a recent conversation:

Everybody has an endless storage of memory… I’m very fond of opening it and bringing things out.

That openness is the marrow of Singh’s work. Her art doesn’t merely recall—it reanimates. It listens to the echoes inside memory and paints them louder.

Style Without Borders

Singh’s stylistic range resists tidy classification. There’s the formal gravitas of Indian court paintings. There’s surrealism, yes, but also abstraction, folk art, and figuration that veers into the fantastical. Her palette is often vibrant, at times acidic, always emotionally alive. The figures in her world—often women—aren’t symbols. They’re survivors.

And yet, this isn’t agitprop. Singh’s politics are felt through form, through the weight of a gaze, the placement of a flower, the twist of a wrist. Even the borders of her paintings—often adorned like tapestries—function like a second frame, calling attention to what is remembered and what is ritualized.

A Life in Layers

As Singh approaches 88, the retrospective feels less like a capstone and more like a portal. Her works are not ordered chronologically, nor do they march neatly through art history’s canon. They accumulate. They meander. They double back. And in doing so, they mirror the very thing she paints: memory—not as fact, but as feeling.

Whether I am aware or not, there is something happening at my core, It is how my life flows.

– Singh notes.

And what a current it is. In Remembering, Singh invites us not only to witness her past but to walk through it—color by color, frame by frame, story by story.

She doesn’t ask us to remember. She paints so that we can’t forget.