Creative Insights: Q&A with MFA candidate Anamika Singh


Over the next few months we are offering a glimpse into the creative process of the Art Department’s graduating master of fine arts candidates, who are presenting their final thesis exhibitions throughout the spring semester. These exhibitions represent the culmination of years of dedicated study and artistic exploration, showcasing our students’ diverse talents and innovative approaches to art-making.

Anamika Singh’s artistic practice spans multiple mediums, drawing from different disciplines including film, sculpture, research, and writing. She shares, “My work as a filmmaker is in conversation with my work in the studio, which often sees a constant rotation of sculptures, objects from my research, photographs, and monitors.”

Singh further explains, “My work contends with the contested histories produced by transfers and flows of power and violence. ‘How is history both an amnesic spell and an aphrodisiac?’ ‘What does it mean for symbols of power to be forged from the debris of violence?’ These are the questions that galvanize my work.”

Anamika Singh

As the winner of this year’s Russell and Paula Panczenko MFA Prize, Singh’s final thesis exhibition, “Corpus,” will be on view at the Chazen Museum from April 7 – July 13.

“This honor has given me the opportunity to execute this body of work at much higher level than I could have on my own,” says Singh. “The support of the Chazen team has been transformative my own vision for this show, and I am so grateful. We are not only able to share my work with the greater Madison community, but also bring my work into conversation with other practitioners.”

“Corpus” grew out of Singh’s film, “Sheetla,” which follows the Hindi language daily journal Jan Morcha and its role in reporting the highly contested desecration of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, Faizabad, in 1992. An opening reception, which is free and open to the public, will take place on Tuesday, April 22, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Chazen’s Mead Witter Lobby. 

In addition, on Sunday, April 20, at 2 p.m., the Chazen will host a screening of “Sheetla” along with Suneil Sanzgiri’s “Letter From Your Far-Off Country” (2020), which will be followed by a moderated conversation between the two artists. 

“unending aftermath,” 2025, photograph

We asked Singh to share some insights about her exhibition. Following is an edited Q&A:

What inspired you to create this exhibition? Being born and raised in the Subcontinent and the U.S. deeply influenced my questions around power, violence and history. In both places I witnessed the desire to capture and own history, to have authority over it. My work doesn’t think about history as a vestige of the past, but very much as something that is reanimated in the present and to mark the future.

“Corpus,” 2025, concrete and stainless steel

How did you create it? The moving images and photographs within my work are produced during both site and archival research. The images within this exhibition emerged out of my film, “Sheetla.” 

“Sheetla” follows Jan Morcha, a cooperative Hindi language daily that focuses on regional and national news in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, and its former chief editor, the late Sheetla Singh — my granduncle. Jan Morcha’s role as a media organization has also been crucial to “recall[ing] the historiography of communal violence” (Setalvad 2023) in the wake of the highly contested desecration of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, Faizabad, in 1992. 

My sculptures are often a mix of concrete, resin, and other industrial objects — materials from research and molds. Much like the sites I research from, my sculptures and installations often invoke the aftermath of destruction and the debris of new construction.

Read more about Singh’s work in this article from the Chazen Museum of Art.

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