Sifr denies and claims totality at the same time. It is a rebellious figure that refuses fixity and binary to find movement in stillness. The whirling dervish pauses mid-moment for an eternity, reverberating the energy of a restless particle that captures the gravitational dynamics of the universe and its smallest of its constituents. Zero is the ether to Gunjan Kumar, an all-pervading vessel that is able to contain the unrest of all the worlds, and the calm after the storm. Sifr finds form in Gunjan Kumar’s subtractive aesthetics, in primary colours and cone, a primary form whose essential constituent is movement, each spiral flick of the hand collapsing into its formation. In times of unrest marked by collective mobilization on one hand and annihilation on the other, in Sifr we are able to find affective modalities of dialoguing with one another, the calm of acceptance and quiet determination in the motions of a lone studio process, tethered to the world around us. We are witness to the aftermath of an artistic endeavour of processing the tumultuous choreographies of urgency, mundanity and happenstance into form, the shape of a handmade cone.
This is a practice where the artist’s process supersedes the art object, which becomes incidental, and meaning making is contingent on the coming together of material, space and encounter. The rebellious abandon of Sifr, the churning of time and history, repetition without sameness, are continuous and impossible to pin down, except in the still-ness of Gunjan Kumar’s work. Within each trace left behind by movements that constitute each work, eternities reside, yet refuse to be categorized, studied and labelled, even at the molecular level.
— Excerpt from exhibition text by Anushka Rajendran