An eight-year gap in an artist's CV usually demands an explanation. Where did they go? Why did they stop? Did the work dry up, or did the opportunities?
UBIK has little interest in those questions. The absence itself has become the work.
Opening this month at APRE Art House in Mumbai, Gaps In My Resume arrives after the artist's longest period away from exhibiting. The exhibition circles the structures that shape contemporary art rather than the mythology surrounding the artist. Markets, branding, aspiration, institutional etiquette and professional survival all surface here, though rarely in straightforward ways. Brass rusts. Iron corrodes. Familiar materials carry the polished appearance of permanence while quietly revealing their own instability.
That perspective comes from someone who has spent nearly two decades inside the business of art without following its conventional path. A self-taught designer, UBIK has produced identities for galleries, art fairs, magazines and cultural institutions while maintaining an independent conceptual practice. Looking at the art world from both sides has left little room for romanticism.
"I do occupy this very sort of precarious space between critique and complicity," they say. "I've always sort of been an outsider... and that has given me an interesting perspective to critique the art world, but also be okay with the fact that I am still part of the art world."
It is a rare position in Indian contemporary art, where institutional critique often remains an imported discourse rather than a sustained artistic concern. UBIK's work avoids grand declarations. Instead, it lingers over the smaller rituals that govern cultural value: the aesthetics of prestige, the language of professional aspiration, the choreography of visibility.
The eight-year pause, it turns out, was less dramatic than it appears on paper. "I really missed making work," UBIK says. "I sort of stopped after my last solo... I just felt like taking a break." The exhibitions stopped. The thinking did not. Design work expanded, writing continued, and distance gradually altered their relationship with art making. "After I turned 40, it just made sense for me to come back... I just felt a lot more free."
That freedom is measured less by productivity than detachment. "I stopped really giving too much damn about the art world," they admit, a statement that feels less rebellious than practical. Having a design practice meant they could step outside the rhythms of exhibitions and deadlines without stepping away from creative work altogether.
UBIK understands why younger artists play the market more strategically. "You need to compete for attention and visibility. It is a very cutthroat world," they say. Yet they remain sceptical of allowing those calculations to become the work itself.
Perhaps that is what makes Gaps In My Resume feel unexpectedly timely. It is less concerned with disappearing from the art world than with asking what becomes visible once the pressure to constantly perform success begins to recede.
What: Gaps In My Resume by UBIK
When: 26th June to 4th July
Where: APRE Art House, Colaba
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