Deep दीप, 2025
Cubes, Khartoum Place, Auckland, CBD, New Zealand
Deep explores Diwali as both a sacred ritual and a living, evolving tradition within Aotearoa New Zealand. The title has a double meaning, in Hindi meaning light or lamp. The play on words adds to the notion of a layered experience of migration, adaptation, and connection between old and new worlds.
Across four cubes, the installation traces a journey from the cultural origins of Diwali and the devotional ritual of aarti- the offering of light to the divine. The work honours Diwali as a space of reflection and embraces the diverse ways South Asian communities sustain and reimagine Diwali in a new land.
The work speaks to continuity, devotion, and illumination, this visual narrative questions how symbols of culture and faith are carried, reshaped, and sometimes resisted in new contexts. Working collaboratively, Tarika Sabherwal and Jessie Kanji present a site of tension: between reverence and critique, belonging and estrangement, memory and reinvention. Kanji mirrors light as a vessel for memory, connection, and renewal, drawing from the sensory experiences of South Asia. Sabherwal, in turn, resists notions of blind cultural obedience, stretching and rearticulating traditional iconography to suggest alternative possibilities. Her work proposes that an alternative version can exist alongside the original without erasure.
Proudly supported by Auckland Council and the City Centre Targeted Rate. @tarikasab
Deep in Collaboration with Tarika Sabherwal
Om Namah Shivay, 2024
BNZ Auckland Diwali Festival, Lightboxes Bledisloe Lane, Auckland CBD, New Zealand
Diwali offers reflection, an intimate space between the dark and the light. Light becomes the touchstone to consciousness, connected to the new moon that speaks to the vast potential of a new cycle - an evolution. Once we acknowledge the darkness, we can welcome the light.
This suite of works between Tiffany Singh and Jessie Kanji builds upon the established relationships between print, photography, performance and installation. What distinguishes print and photography from one another is that photography records a moment in the history of light, while print recalls this moment, thickening the passage of time in the amber-like qualities of ink. Print becomes a recollection, as the image moves from film, to ink, to digital activation by light, a transformation of memory occurs. In the layers of installation and performance art emerges a bridge between the real and the imagined.
Here, in the southern hemisphere, time is demarcated by the lengthening of days and receding nights as the seasons change. In India, we experience Diwali with the nights closing in, and a drop-in temperature as the northern hemisphere transitions into winter. With no two instances of light being the same, Diwali reminds us of the freshness of each breath, each moment, each experience and each opportunity to embrace change.
Dedicated to Laxmi Morar Patel 28/10/1939 - 10/05/24
Proudly supported by Auckland Council and the City Centre Targeted Rate. @tiffany.singh.artist
Om Namah Shivay in Collaboration with Tiffany Singh
