Open Fences: Presenting the works of Bikash Chandra Senapati, Kapil Jangid, Sabiha Dohadwala, Sowat, Suruchi Choksi and Tomislav Topić

Gallery XXL is pleased to announce Open Fences, a group exhibition presenting the works of Bikash Chandra Senapati, Kapil Jangid, Sabiha Dohadwala, Sowat, Suruchi Choksi, and Tomislav Topić, on view from 4 April through 16 May 2026.

A fence is a line that binds and divides. It is through this form that the works in this exhibition hold the human condition at a distance precise enough to see it clearly: its existential angst, its silence, its disconnection. Yet that precise distance reveals an uncertain connection where liminality is not a threshold to be crossed but a condition to be inhabited, disorderly, entangled, and circling back on itself in a desire to find comfort and togetherness.

Open Fences holds both the structure and the rupture simultaneously. Fences and gates are woven to relinquish a memory of the past and rebuild it into the present, and in that opening, the viewer is invited to enter, to stand at the threshold, to feel the pull between enclosure and release, between what the line holds and what it lets through. It stands, and it opens.

Each practice in this exhibition returns to the line differently, yet each is bound by it. In her hand-woven jacquard and yarn works, Sabiha Dohadwala spans the distance between architectural rigidity and the tender, repetitive labor that unfolds behind it in The Wall that Wore Lace, The Window that Grew a Garden and A Room that Breathed in Stitches. Using threads to reconstruct memory by destructing the image, she chooses what details to keep or remove, finding The Pattern that Sprouted in the Gaps while A Conversation Held in Hands. Threads knot differently in the drawings and woodcuts of Bikash Chandra Senapati, whose lines delineate the silent landscapes of the mind alongside those we inhabit. In works such as Apart from You is Me and A Straight Line, he holds memory, transition, and the in-between, whereas he explores the distance between Alsigarh and Peace where fluidity and structure coexist. That boundary dissolves in the acrylic, pastel, and ink works of Suruchi Choksi, where accidents shift shapes and lines to expose a world in flux. In her Zero Plus Anything is a World series and the ink works What Shifts, What Follows, coalesced bodies emerge as fleeting presences that display form becoming emptiness and emptiness becoming form. Kapil Jangid traces a harder line: the skyline that promises advancement while erasing the home beneath it. His Urban Facades series cast in cement, concrete, oxidised pigment, and black glass draft the distance between sterile planning and the informal architectures where bodies once lived. Tomislav Topić melts those architectures into colour and gestures moving between chaos and clarity, turmoil and ecstasy. Through Painting 2025/01, the Study Goa works on paper, the Selbstläufer Goa series, and the fiberglass installation Coloropolis Echo II, Tomislav’s forms collapse and collide, marking a point of reflection at the threshold of the felt and the fleeting. Sowat pushes the line until language breaks in Sun RA, his typographic maze renders letters un-decipherable, dots and strokes a freedom from the grid, glistening ink catching light like the residue of something almost magical.

The exhibition brings these six practices into a shared space not by resolving what they hold in common, but by tracing what moves between them: memory, place, language, body, and the liminal space between absence and presence.The viewer is invited to enter, to move through the distance, and to find in that movement the possibility of connection.