An exhibition like Remembering – A Cartography of Memory and Meaning should have taken place long ago. That it took this long for a comprehensive institutional show on Arpita Singh’s practice to come to fruition, particularly in the United Kingdom, is telling of the historical oversight of women artists from South Asia in the global art world. And yet, when it arrives, it does so with a resounding clarity and softness—a resistance not through noise but through a slow, heavy unfolding of memory, symbolism and aesthetic defiance. Curated by Tamsin Hong at the Serpentine,London, Remembering—on display until 27th of July 2025—brings together over 160 works, 140 of which have travelled from India. The scale is ambitious, but what strikes me most is the intimacy the exhibition manages to retain despite its monumental nature. It moves like a stream of consciousness, layered with recollection, mythology and everyday chaos, anchored always in the personal. As Geeta Kapur posits in her essay in the accompanying catalogue, “her works gain luminosity from philosophic and literary propositions.” This is a show about storytelling, but not one that imposes. Singh doesn’t offer explanations. She leaves gaps, lets symbols repeat, leaving the space for viewers to shape their own stories. Her visual vocabulary— full of repetition, coded symbols and quiet clues—doesn’t shout; it gently insists. The dualities in her work, the multiplicities, the mirrored forms and contradictions all reflect a personality that refuses to offer just one version of a story. She creates worlds that invite but do not demand reading. Her world is dense yet accessible. It is a world in which celebration and sorrow coexist—a world that gives the viewer agency. One walks through a chronological trail, yet notices repetition of images: men in black jackets (a nod, perhaps, to colonial administrators) in The Tamarind Tree (2022), the aeroplanes in Munna Apa’s Garden (1989), the naked female forms like in Woman with a Boat (2002), the astrologically infused symbols in My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising (2005). These are not motifs to be decoded so much as felt. They are Singh’s grammar of remembering. The nude figures are not eroticised but simply there—comfortable, observational, and human as in her watercolour on paper work, Rose Memories (2003). The pink, used on walls and in several works like The Listeners (2010) and My Lily Pond (2009), carries both irony and irony’s erasure—it softens, distracts, highlights and conceals. Singh’s works on paper—so many of them—tell of fragility, temporality and repetition. Her titles, like Paperboats, act as quiet provocations: how does one archive what is ephemeral? Additionally, Singh’s feminist position is foundational but never didactic as in Devi Pistol Wali (1990). This is not the feminism of declarations—it is embedded, lived, inherited.