Exhibition

Nicola Singh: Sincere Seeker

24 Apr 2025

Cubitt Gallery

London N1 9HH

Overview

Nicola Singh: Sincere Seeker

Exhibition: 24 April - 31 May 2025

Preview: 7-9pm Thursday, April 24

Sincere Seeker is a new exhibition comprising sculpture, sound, and performance by British-Punjabi artist Nicola Singh. In this solo presentation at Cubitt, the gallery becomes home to three monkey statues, cast from a soft-toy monkey that belonged to her Dad.

The manifold meanings of these monkeys include; their familial significance to Singh; the mantra of the three wise monkeys (See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil); the concept of the ‘monkey mind’, an East Asian metaphor for a restless thinker, seeking meaning and interconnectedness through wandering thoughts; and as vessels for sound and the somatic science of the Sanskrit alphabet.

The sound of entirely improvised vocalisations, inspired from a myriad of practices, play from inside each monkey. Influences come from Singh’s recent training in Dhrupad, a North Indian classical music tradition; her experience with Pranayama and in therapeutic vocal practices, as well as experiments with Sanskrit syllables and mantras from ancient Vedic texts, the sounds of monkeys both real and imagined, and samples from the single Denial Is a River by Doechii and Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Natural Mystic.

The sounds and images present in this newly-commissioned body of work rely on repetition, a device used in many vocal traditions to bring the practitioner to a transcendental state. In Sincere Seeker, these mantric-like repetitive cycles move between states of meditation, play and agitation, complicating a singular narrative for engaging with Singh’s expansive practices.

Singh’s vocals imbue the hollow monkeys with traces of esoteric ritual, vocalised gibberish, and hints of every emotional pain. The monkeys sit stunned–cute, abject, lost little gods.

This exhibition is supported by anonymous supporters and is part of Cubitt’s 2023–25 Curatorial Fellowship, Feeling Still in a World Which Runs, curated by Seán Elder.

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