Working through the media of video, sculpture, installation, and drawing, Ayesha Singh’s practice unsettles systems and relations of power in architecture. In Skewed Histories, the use of architecture is simultaneously conditioned by the hybrid ambitions of Mughal design, and contemporary historiographical revisions. Singh has amalgamated historical fragments, present memories, and future objects of nostalgia to build these imaginary monuments, which mimic Mughal buildings currently under threat. Melancholy has become one with the architectural ornaments, pieced together through forms of colonization, resistance, and entanglement, now made endangered for carrying a history that is no longer desirable in the making of a national identity.

This work is included in Ornamenting Relation, curated by Noor Bhangu, which features artists Hamra Abbas, Golnar Adili, Azadeh Elmizadeh, and Ayesha Singh. Through the individual lightboxes, the artists present their encounters with the ornamental canon of Islamic visual culture to reveal the continuities and discontinuities of the field in relation to contemporary art and political discourses.

Taking inspiration from traditional aspects of Islamic art, outlined by Laura Marks, as “almost always avoid[ing] depicting anything with a face, anything with a body, and even sometimes anything with an outline,” Ornamenting Relation seeks to understand the transgressive and relational potentialities of abstract aesthetics in mediating dialogue across diverse cultures.