I Got A Cut In My Flower Valley: Gurjeet Singh On Showing At Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Gurjeet Singh works out of a studio in Chandigarh, building soft sculptures from fabric that other people had given up on: torn bedsheets, rejected embroidery samples, fairly-priced buttons bought at a market stall. Since his first show at Khoj, his work has circled queerness, memory and the body, and done it with a humour and warmth that prevents it from being didactic. A piece from that early show now sits in the permanent collection of the Asian Art Museum in California. A drawing followed it there through Chemould, the Mumbai gallery that represents him. I Got a Cut in My Flower Valley, opening this week at Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Los Angeles, is his first exhibition in the US built entirely around his own work, after one earlier group show at the same gallery.

Singh set out, as he always does, to sit with his materials and let the process happen to him before jumping into anything with half a mind. Two pieces in, he noticed flowers turning up everywhere, unintentionally. Then he noticed how every flower in the work had a thread running straight through it, or a cut, or a tear he'd had to patch and reinforce to keep the fabric from giving way. "When I was cutting the threads, the flowers themselves were being cut through," he says. The title presented itself from there onwards. He had used it once before, for an early work at Khoj, but this time it carried the weight of everything happening around him while he made the show.

Last year, Punjab's Pride march was cancelled after threats that anyone who showed up would be beaten, and the hostility toward queer people online had grown loud, casual, unremarkable to the people posting it. A young actor from Punjab, openly gay, was threatened over the phone for continuing to work. All of it worked its way into the show, alongside a question Singh cares deeply about: who gets to decide what a body is allowed to be, wear, desire, become. For the artist, the work is ultimately about the ordinary freedoms people should be allowed to claim for themselves, and the insistence that these decisions belong to individuals rather than society. Rather than separating the personal from the political, Singh lets them develop together. The exhibition grows out of his own process, but also out of everything he was seeing and hearing around him at the time.

The show's curatorial text, written by Noor Bhangu, Indo-Canadian Art Curator and Scholar reads the twelve sculptures as studies in rupture and repair, and in the friction that sits between the two. The stitch, in that framing, is never just craft or a metaphor; it's a gesture that turns a social wound into the place from which feeling and politics get sewn back together. The flowers that migrate across every title in the show carry beauty and fragility in the same breath: queer joy in India today sits inches from the threat of violence circulating on the same feeds that carry it.

What The Figures Mean

Flower, Knotted, Knotted, Knotted tongue is a figure with a hand pressed to its forehead, its mouth tied shut in knot after knot, until there's no room left to speak. It's a fairly literal picture of what silence under pressure looks like. "When a thread develops knots, you can always feel them," Singh says. "I wanted to talk about life in the same way, about how we continue to feel those knots when society keeps doing these hurtful things to us." 

Beside it sits a piece very bright and busy with colour. Flower, Broken Petals immediately draws you towards the beads coming loose in places, petals falling from a flower nobody watered, in all its vibrant glory. And the Flower, I overheard you figure, wears a pair of bronze ears, hard and unyielding, drawn from an expression he finds himself saying every now and then: mere kaan pak gaye baat sun sun ke.

One piece is built almost entirely from his own bedsheet: torn at the edges where the hooks once held it, buried under successive layers of white cloth that went on to tear in turn. A bed is where the body is meant to rest, and just as often where it doesn't, where sleeplessness settles in and a person is left alone with everything they're carrying. Singh uses that whiteness to sit with the idea of maila, the word people reach for when they want to mark someone as impure. The piece leaves the question: who the word actually belongs to, the person it's aimed at, or the person wielding it.

And then there's the largest piece in the show, arms reaching outward in every direction, it aims to say, Come, Hug Me. Be Aware. I Can Trick You. "If people assume that I don't have the power to resist, they're mistaken," Singh says. "If someone tries to harm me, I won't remain silent." It's an invitation and a warning in the same body, which might be the closest thing the show has to a self-portrait.

Underneath all of it is the practice Singh has been building since he was a boy in Chandigarh watching his mother and sisters embroider, and helping his father take scooters apart and put them back together. Sikh miniatures, Punjabi wall murals, the folk tradition of guddiyan patole. "The materials always remain in my studio until the right moment arrives, I never force the work to look a certain way. I enjoy watching it grow naturally",  he says. Good storytelling through the medium of art only comes through when it has been well thought-out, one must be patient and kind enough with it for the output to exude the true intent that went in the process of creating it, and Gurjeet seems to have mastered that. 

Singh has described his practice previously as meethi dawai: sweet medicine, the kind that works on a person slowly, without any bitterness folded into it. It's a fitting description of Singh's oeuvre. 

That reflects in how he talks about the work reaching people. He has little patience for the idea that contemporary art needs a password, or a full-blown handbook for your take on it to be valuable. "I prefer experiencing the work first," he says. He admits there are major contemporary artists' works he still doesn't fully understand, and that this used to bother him and doesn't anymore. Sometimes you return to a piece years later, and it finally opens up. The work hasn't changed. You probably have. "An artist has a responsibility to make the work," he says, "but after that, the work exists beyond the confines of the artist's expectations." 

This very instinct of trusting the slowness, shapes his answer to AI-generated art too, a subject he approaches without much alarm. He doesn't think it will replace what he does. The decisions that matter still land on a person: someone has to sit with the failed attempt, the print that came out wrong four times running, and decide what happens next. His own pieces take him the better part of a year, sometimes longer, because there's no shortcut through them. Every piece, in his words, is "my own little child," and he cannot pick a favourite among them. And you really cannot 

His relationship with Rajiv Menon began with that earlier group show, the one that led to a piece entering the Asian Art Museum's permanent collection, and it has since grown into a friendship built on shared ideas of what their craft means to them. Menon never asked what he was making or how far along it was; he waited out the year and a half it took to finish this body of work. Chemould, the gallery that represents Singh at home, has offered the same kind of room. "They understand my work," Singh says of Shireen and the team there. "They know how much space I need."

Singh wants his work to travel because distance changes what a piece can do: a stranger in another country recognising, in stitched fabric and a broken button, a feeling they thought was only theirs to carry. Underneath everything he makes is a need to turn something discarded into something beautiful, and to let it reach whoever needs it, wherever they happen to be standing when it finds them. And his new opening might be just the start of that beautiful journey.