Is It ? Or It Is : 28 October- 28 November, 2026
Gallery XXL is pleased to announce Is it? Or It Is?, a group exhibition presenting the works of DSR, DO, Marina Zumi, Natasha Singh, RERO, Suruchi Choksi, Space Objekt, the back studio, UBIK, Vernika Singh and ZERO, opening on Wednesday, 28 October 2026 with Def Col Art Night and on view through November 28, 2026.
Understanding comes before sight. We recognise a grill, a signal or a pattern before we examine it, and much of seeing is recognition, an agreement made in advance. Across neon glass, galvanised steel, fibreglass, photography, lightboxes and installation, the works in this exhibition test that agreement with two questions: What do you see? Why do you see what you see? From Gallery XXL, the city is seen moving past, the gaze turns inward and outward at once.
The exhibition holds both certainty and its suspension. RERO’s practice rests on a single visual grammar: uppercase statements in Verdana, each crossed out by a horizontal line that does not erase but interrogates, holding the text and its own invalidation in tension so that the viewer must choose between what is written and what is denied. His work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, the Grand Palais and MAC/VAL, and in India with St+art India Foundation. the back studio, the Turin and Mumbai duo of Eugenio Rossi and Yaazd Contractor, sets blown glass neon against galvanised steel signage boards in a series of window grills drawn from Mumbai, placing the near-obsolete craft of cold cathode glass beside digitised mass fabrication. Their sharp forms offer a false sense of protection, and no one quite knows protection from what, or for whom.
Light turns the question towards the city. Marina Zumi’s light-based columns stand side by side and never touch, held together by nothing but light, while Space Objekt works with neon, etched acrylic, mirror and dichroic film to treat the city after dark as a composition never entirely fixed. UBIK reads Delhi’s intersections and reflective stickers as a softer form of surveillance, in minimal conceptual works that are critical and humorous at once.
Elsewhere the question loosens into joy, doubt and the self. Vernika Singh preserves the lightness of the balloon in fibreglass and automotive paint, so that stillness seems poised to move. DSR’s photographs and sculpted objects are confessions rather than records, built before the shutter falls. In Natasha Singh’s Fractal of Deity, a Kolam cell unfolds into a structure in which each gate contains another gate. Suruchi Choksi’s koan-led works ask whether a truth outlasts the circumstances that shaped it, and ZERO’s Keep Scrolling counts the likes, comments and views by which we measure our worth.
Rather than offering a single interpretation, the exhibition brings different perspectives into dialogue, inviting us to reconsider the systems through which we perceive and inhabit the world. Along the way, provocations arise: Who commands these systems, and who are they built for? What are we agreeing to every time we call something real, and who decides when the agreement ends?
Sometimes, an answer; at other times, a new way of looking, and the joy of looking again.
