Kya nadi ke paar sukoon hai?: Bikash Solo Exhibition

Gallery XXL presents Kya nadi ke paar sukoon hai?, a solo exhibition of Bikash Chandra Senapati, opening Friday, September 11, 2026. The exhibition brings together works made between 2019 and 2026, across woodcut, etching, pen on paper, and acrylic on canvas.

Rooted in the artist's memories of Kendrapara, a coastal town of Odisha, where he spent his formative years, the works trace Bikash's practice and travels across New Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Udaipur, and now Vadodara, where he currently resides. The exhibition puts forth an inquiry into the observations made during these transitional periods, opening onto a persistent tension between urban and rural life — where Bikash's search for tranquility lies in the metaphor of the river systems he grew up around, holding within them love, memory, and loss.

Sukoon carries this same double weight. In Arabic grammar, sukūn is a small loop (ـْ) placed above a letter to show it carries no vowel — a mark of stillness, a natural pause where sound stops. In Islamic tradition, the word is used to describe peaceful states of remembrance. For Bikash, home is a place he can return to, and sukoon is the stillness that return holds.

The recurring circle in Bikash's drawings and woodcuts represents a portrait of this journey — of leaving and returning. It has an earlier life: as a child, he would turn marks into free birds, shapes that could move, migrate, transition. That same impulse still drives the work. Around the circle, lines gather into entangled experience: dots and marks chart the struggle of travel held within the line, one point moving toward another. Feelings take on geometric form; lines behave like musical notes; trees appear as circles. 

Among the works on view, the woodblock Ancestral Lines anchors the exhibition, built from months spent observing a single banyan tree in the Vadodara forest. Meditative Mindscape and Unnamed Landscapes depict trees fading with memory, even as the work insists on preserving what is disappearing, while the pigmented woodcuts Jawai and Colours of Udaipur, made during a residency in Udaipur, hold trees in water as the day turns from dusk to dawn, their colour drawn from the plateaus and rock formations of Rajasthan. A Straight Line, a body of black-and-white acrylic works, marks a different register within the show, made through the artist's father's illness and after his death, where stories of the past surface against the depth of the black.

His materials and mediums become points of reflection and distance as a way to process the chapters of a life in which each moment shapes the next. The exhibition design invites viewers to wander through the works as if walking through these phases of Bikash's life. Kya nadi ke paar sukoon hai? foreshadows what lies before, between, and beyond the river for Bikash, evoking marks driven by a desire to live in the duality of simplicity and complexity.