Drawing Walks with Gagan Singh & Niroj Satpathy

Drawing Walks was announced as a two-day event as part of Niroj Satpathy’s artist residency at Project_Space. Niroj invited Gagan Singh to collaborate with him, and together they led the participants to respond to and explore, through drawing and/or ‘mark-making’, the neighbourhoods of Lado Sarai and Saidulajab.

Lado Sarai and Saidulajaib, are both old localities, designated as 'urban villages’ or Lal Dora areas within the Master Plan of New Delhi. They have long histories in the many iterations of the city. Drawing Walks was an attempt to locate and uncover objects and material histories that exist on the streets, in the minds of the inhabitants, and the buried body of the city.

The conversational walks were a meeting point for the two artists’ interests - Niroj’s fascination with materials/objects that are embedded in the local - their rejected pasts, ongoing lives, and future possibilities; and Gagan’s interest in drawing as ‘mark making’ and the effect of the immediate, imagined and real drawing walks, and the interaction between material medium and the immaterial.

Gagan Singh is a Delhi-based artist exploring drawing through working on site, the book format, writing and workshops. He is a graduate from Kent Institute of Art and Design. Working with line drawings, sketches, fading figures, scribbles he navigates the contemporary art space through interventions that challenges formality, drawing boards and canvases. From drawing on walls to paper, his images offer us a new modes of thinking on drawing, and are ‘lines that draw themselves out’.

FICA launched the first iteration of ProjectSpace @ FICA Reading Room, inviting Niroj Satpathy to be artist-in-residence through June 2019. You can read more about Project_Space, Niroj’s residency, and his practice here.