Sculpting the Armature of a Wounded World

By Ranjan Kaul

The recent solo exhibition (25 December 2025 to 5 January 2026) by Pintu Sikder at Shridharani Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam complex, New Delhi, titled Perception Unfold 25-26, brought together an evocative and thought-provoking collection of sculptures that makes a sharp commentary on multiple crises shaping our contemporary world.

View of the exhibition: Pintu Sikder (left) with Ranjan Kaul

The works in the show address several key issues that are often relegated to the margins of public discussion: ecological degradation, unplanned industrialization, commodification, compulsions of migration, reckless urban expansion, consumerism and human greed, animal exploitation, and the relentless spectre of war and destruction. What makes the exhibition particularly compelling is the sculptor’s decision to ‘unfold’ (as the exhibition title suggests) the underlying armatures and moulds fashioned out of beaten metal into living works of art. While Besides giving an insight into the intricacies of the process of sculpture-making and the intricacies of the process, the inside-out exhibits become a conceptual exposé, reminding us that every social and geo-political reality has an invisible scaffolding that is often made of erasure, rupture, and human greed.

Pintu Sikder

Pintu Sikder did his BVA (2006) from the Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, Kolkata, and subsequently completed his MVA in 2009 from Rabindra Bharathi University, Kolkata, specializing in sculpture. His work over the last 15 years extends to immersive site-specific installations that offer a critique on issues such as global warming, socio-cultural imbalances and ills of urbanization and unplanned industrialization. Many of his earlier works were crafted using the industrial brass nut. While the works in this show also use his signature brass nut at places, the sculptor makes a welcome departure using beaten and ruptured metal and wood.

Untitled (Scorpion), Brass, Aluminum, 21” x 54” x 41”, 2025

A striking mammoth sculpture of a scorpion confronts the viewers as you enter the gallery, but bereft of its deadly sting, looking worn out and beaten owing to human exploitation, The species often subjected to commodification in the name of scientific experimentation and supposed medicinal value. Constructed from beaten metal components, parts of the work bear the imprint of bubble wrap pressed against its surface, silently conjuring up the world of packaging, shipping, and mass merchandising. The tactile memory of the bubble wrap lingers like a ghost in the metal, suggesting how merchandising has penetrated even the realm of the living. The scorpion becomes both a specimen and a product, serving as a metaphor for the broader condition of non-human life being pushed towards extinction by human greed in the name of development.

Untitled (Deer), Diptych, Brass, Aluminum, Wood, 51” x 54” x 9”, 2025

Animal exploitation is a theme that runs through many of the other sculptures exhibited in the show. Another poignant work is a diptych centred on the deer, an animal that has long occupied a fraught space in human imagination as prey, commodity, and a badge of conquest. Once hunted as a leisure sport by the privileged and valued as trophies and decorative mementos, deer flesh continues to find itself as meat on lavish banquet tables. In one panel of the diptych, the artist evokes the simultaneous erasure of natural habitats and the rise of “concrete jungles,” the hard geometries of urban expansion metaphorically juxtaposed against the delicate branching of the deer’s antlers. In the complementary work, the viewer comes face to face with the chillingly clinical segmentation of the deer’s body as gourmet – portions of meat marked out as in a butcher’s diagram. The line “We had a good run” inscribed on the top left corner, suggestive of a deer hunt, drips with sarcasm. Together, the diptych becomes an elegy for a species whose beauty and ecological role are increasingly overshadowed by its vulnerability to extinction.

Untitled (Pelvic Bone), Brass and wood, 82” x 35” x 26”, 2025

Themes of rupture, belonging, and displacement emerge powerfully in a sculpture depicting a pelvic bone linking two dissimilar parts. Just as the pelvic bone anchors the human torso and enables movement and balance, in the sculpture it becomes a symbolic hinge connecting two forms constructed from different forms, materials, and visual languages. The fragile bonds that hold displaced communities and hybrid selves together appear both necessary and strained. They speak eloquently of migration and fractured identities, with the contrasting surfaces and architectural treatments suggest layered histories, as though the sculpture itself were carrying the weight of multiple narratives. Speaking about the work, sculptor Sikder says:

“My surroundings in Sarsuna, Khudiram pally, the suburb of a mega city, is majorly constituted of a migrant population . . . This sculpture delves into the realm of displacement, the built identity, an urge to be included, an ever-changing anxious bond.”

Untitled (Durga mould and armature outer and inner views, 73” x 31” x 28”, Brass and Iron, 2025

Untitled (Mould of Durga Head, inner and inner views, with detail in the centre), 38” x 36” x 20”, Brass, 2025

Included in the show are the armatures and moulds of two parallel versions of the goddess Durga, acquainting the viewers with the travails of idol-making who normally we only get to see in the decked-up, divine form. While the mould of the head of Durga stands on the armature of one work, the other equally resonant work shows the head of Durga, its assembly seen through the interplay of positive and negative moulds, joineries, and hammered metal sheets. Worshipped as an embodiment of feminine strength, here Durga in the show is presented as a figure inscribed with stories of labour, silent struggle, and endurance. The marks on the metal skin feel like memory traces, recording the histories of survival, etching the lives of women. The material itself acquires agency, refusing smooth perfection in favour of a scarred, uneven surface.

The banana plant and its flower hold deep significance in Indian mythology, symbolizing growth, fertility and the divine feminine. A captivating and delicate sculpture depicting a cluster of plantain with a banana flower at the end is an assemblage of various industrial objects suggestive of the contrariness of prosperity and greed.

Untitled (Banana plantain with flower), 75” x 31” x 2&”, Brass, 2025

Untitled (War with fan and fighter jets), right: detail, 63”x 63” x 10”, Brass, Aluminum, 2025

The artist also turns an unflinching gaze towards the violence of contemporary geopolitics. The past year has seen wars, civil conflict, and political aggression across the globe – events are painfully current, as the superpowers assert dominance through brutal might. Instead of doing its role to cool, we see instead the fan fanning raging flames of war with fighter aircrafts flying across the composition with chilling ease.  The mix of shiny grey metal with polished gold creates a rhythmic, almost seductive visual pattern – a mirror of how destruction is so often wrapped in the aesthetics of power, spectacle, and technological sophistication. Beauty here becomes satirical and unsettling as the sculpture exposes the paradox of violence rendered visually alluring.

Taken together, the exhibition becomes a space where materials, processes, and socio-political consciousness converge. By exposing armatures and moulds, by allowing metal to retain its dents and imprints, Sikder transforms images of animals, bodies, machines, and mythology into sites of contemplation. What emerges is a complex poetics that bears witness to the darkness of our times – extinction, displacement, commodification, war – transmuting these realities into disturbing yet seductive forms, not to admire, but to awaken. Sikder invites us to take a hard, critical look at the fraught world that we are shaping that, like the sculptures themselves, are held together tenuously by fragile joints that we can no longer afford to ignore.

(All images are courtesy of the artist Pintu Sikder.)

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Ranjan Kaul is a visual artist, art writer and critic, curator, author, and Founding Partner of artamour. His works may viewed on www.ranjankaul.com and his insta handle @ranjan_creates.