Spotlight Talk: Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu with Deep Kaur Kailey

Artistic Director Deep K Kailey founded the international arts organisation without SHAPE without FORM to break down barriers and build pathways to self-understanding through contemporary culture and spiritual art practices. Throughout her career, she has explored the power of creativity and its ability to connect people and inspire change in our increasingly uncertain and fragmented world.

Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist who works through labor-based knowledge production, Sikh interiority, and blood memory as an adaptive method for resilience and remembrance. Sidhu’s practice draws from a personal lifetime and family lineage of working in metal manufacturing factories and the building of community-based sites for youth development such as Sher-E-Punjab Sports Academy in Chakar, Punjab. His continued practice of sound and silence through a multitude of mediums including omni-directional sound systems (A Disappearance Potential, 2021) counter surveillance drum machines (The PIGG500 Security and Leisure Enhancement Console, 2017) and Simran focused visual output, reveals the expansion of both the social external and cellular internal.

Sidhu’s varying material approaches in painting allow him to express detachment and hyper presence as a guiding singular principle. An aesthetic of nondual activity is central as it precedes the radical distinction between subject and object in his painted works such as They Awakened in Algorithm, 2021. “Painting allows me to center realities of oneness that we don’t encounter physically, by pointing to the ecstatic and sensual in revealing a greater presence, with entities, ideas and one another.” In putting forth such works, the necessity to expand beyond poetics and abstraction become essential to address the realities of languaging, musicking and trancing as natural modes of ‘embodying a text’ or ‘becoming the music’ in the pursuit of a losing one’s autobiographical self. This reflection on life is a personal objective for Sidhu, to embrace continuous death, while alive.

Sidhu’s work has exhibited at the Aichi Triennale, Nagoya City Museum, Japan; Frye Museum of Art, Seattle; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Esker Foundation, Calgary and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. He is a member of the Black Constellation collective and designs clothing and adornment under the Paradise Sportif moniker.

Photo by Ishmael Butler.