In trying to characterize Anjum Singh's art we may look at the city as subject, and street art documentary practices of the 1980's as the first point of entry.
Through India's uncertain growth patterns in recent decades, artists such as KG Subramanyan, GM Sheikh, Arpita Singh and Anupam Sud have imaged the city as the locus of conflict and ennui, the site for the loiterer and the lumpen figure, marking the uncertainty of passage between domestic and public spaces. In a parallel stream in photography, the element of social critique, and the tensions of urbanism become even sharper. The break up of social hierarchy and the decline of heroism in the domain of nation (Ram Rahman) is furthered by images of abject lack and the city as a site of waste (Ketaki Sheth, Sudharak Olwe). Photographers since the mid 1960's and artists latterly have honed in on the surging vitality and contradictions in the conflation of visual fields as diverse as politics, cinema and religion at the level of the street. In this pastiche there is a mingling of the gaze between iconic cutouts, posters, statuary and figures on election posters; equally there is a turning away of the gaze from garbage, street beggars, and the seamy residue of waste.
It is at this juncture that we consider the work of Anjum Singh (b. 1967) where city waste and the degradation of nature come to have their apotheosis. As a practicing artist trained at Santiniketan and the Corcoran School of art, she has gradually moved, from images of the woman in transitory sites, to the impermanence and flux of the city. In tones that are both wry and appraising she gives her subject, the city, dignity and acceptance. City detritus has been a subject of art has some notable exemplars; it becomes material, form and contour even as it leaves a mark as archive and trace. Waste as art object carries within it cultural meaning and specificities of the society that produces it. Such art works challenge the gallery-exhibitory spaces relation to objects of value: for that which is ephemeral, used, soiled or discarded reappears in a controlled environment in another incarnation. As material, waste forms an iconography of careless passage, reducing human presence to the undifferentiated and banal. It bears the residual narrative of the great market systems that drive world economies - manufacturing, packaging, design, marketing, and now their crumpled residue. Embedded within these are marks of human aspiration and appetite, long satisfied.
- Gayatri Sinha