Held earlier this week, contemporary artist Ashima Dhir Sehgal's first solo exhibition What Was Here? opened to a curious audience in Delhi at the Bikaner House. The exhibition itself glided across textile, photography, sculpture and installation, exploring — as the title suggests — what remains after human presence has disappeared. This uncanny investigation delved into places, objects and materials with one question: Can they hold traces of the lives, gestures and moments they have witnessed?
While it'd be more apt to put this question to the audience that was in receipt of Sehgal's work, we were able to afford the artist for a few moments where we posed certain other questions to her. However, before we jump right into the conversation, it is prescient, following the customary tradition, to set some context.
In its investigation of potential human presence in things after the former has disappeared, the exhibition drew on encounters with historic Indian architecture, using processes such as stitching, layering, burning and unravelling to explore the fragile relationship between memory, time and material. As recognisable architectural forms gradually dissolved into fragments and textures, the exhibition culminated in a house installation that invited viewers to step inside what remained.
In a way, Sehgal’s own trajectory has been marked by reinvention. Having begun her career as a lawyer, she later turned towards art without formal training, developing a multidisciplinary practice that has featured in more than 40 exhibitions and art platforms in India and abroad. Her work has been presented at venues including ARMA Museum in Bali, and she was selected for the 21st Arte Laguna Prize in 2026 and the Florence Biennale 2027. In this conversation, A.D.S. discusses the origins of What Was Here?, her engagement with architecture and material, and the question of whether the traces of human presence can outlast the people who leave them behind.
Robb Report India (RR): What inspired you to explore the idea of memory through materials and historic architecture in What Was Here??
Ashima Dhir Sehgar (ADS): During my art residency in Naggar, Himachal Pradesh, I became fascinated by how an old carved wooden door holds two kinds of time: the hours of skilled work that shaped it, and the years of living that altered it.
I was struck by how time becomes tangible in wood: a softened edge, a deepened crack, a carving slowly losing definition. Those changes led me to wonder whether time leaves a form of memory within the material itself.
Photographing these spaces and transferring their images became a way of pursuing that question. On silk organza, the architectural details seemed to hover between clarity and disappearance. That uncertainty echoed what had drawn me to the buildings: their physical presence endured, while so much of their history remained inaccessible.
What Was Here? began with that tension. A place can survive the lives that gave it meaning. What might its materials still hold?
RR: How did you choose the materials used in the exhibition, such as silk organza, ash, and discarded threads?
ADS: I chose materials whose physical qualities could actively shape the work. Silk organza offered transparency and depth with very little weight. It allowed me to build layered surfaces that hand embroidery could connect, interrupt, or hold together.
Ash brought a different challenge: it is a residue that can disperse at the slightest disturbance. Charcoal offered both a drawing medium and the substance of transformed wood. Discarded silk threads gave me colour and texture already present in the fibres; gathering and stitching them became a way of constructing sculptural forms.
What interested me was the relationship between care and fragility. These materials ask for patient handling, yet retain an element of unpredictability. How tightly to stitch, how much to gather, and where to leave an opening all help determine the work’s character. Their delicacy makes the act of making especially consequential.
RR: The works move from recognisable architectural imagery to abstraction and absence. What does this progression represent?
ADS: The progression represents the gradual loss of our ability to recognise what a trace belongs to. At first, architecture gives the viewer a point of reference. As the exhibition unfolds, that reference becomes less certain. Colour, fragments and openings take on greater importance, until the material holds our attention even when the image can no longer be identified. I think of this as a movement from material memory towards material silence. Something remains, but it becomes increasingly difficult to say what it is evidence of.
Absence, then, has a physical presence in the work. An opening or an incomplete form asks us to consider what it once held. I wanted the viewer to feel that recognition can fall away while the trace continues to exist.
RR: The exhibition culminated in a house installation. What did you want visitors to take away from experiencing this space?
ADS: Visitors moved from architectural images through their fading and fragmentation to entering an architectural form themselves in The Threshold. Inside, threads hanging from the roof made material memory a sensory experience. Each movement revealed some strands and obscured others.
The door, visible but blocked by red threads, marked the limit of return. You can remember what lies beyond it, but you cannot enter that past again or change what happened there. The memory remains, even when the moment itself is gone.
I wanted visitors to leave more attentive to ordinary materials, wondering what they might retain of earlier lives and experiences. The enquiry could then continue beyond the gallery, in the objects they live with every day.
RR: You moved from law to art without formal art education. How has this unconventional journey shaped your practice?
ADS: Law trained me to distinguish between what I observe and what I infer. It also taught me that what is said and what remains unsaid both hold weight. That discipline shapes my art: I question my first reading and look closely at what I might have overlooked.
Being self-taught has given me freedom to develop my own methods and follow an idea across photography, textile, sculpture and installation. Experimentation, residencies and mentorship have become my continuing education.
I bring the discipline of questioning to the studio, alongside the freedom to experiment and discover my own artistic language.
RR: What was the most challenging aspect of putting together your first solo exhibition in India?
ADS: The greatest challenge was editing. When you have lived closely with a body of work, every piece carries a reason to be there. I had to step back and ask which works strengthened the exhibition, and which needed to be held back.
Framing, placement, and the space between works became as consequential as the selection itself. I wanted each piece to have room, while allowing the relationships between them to give the exhibition coherence.
Lekha Poddar and Pooja Sood were invaluable guides whenever I felt uncertain. Their advice on framing, display and selection, alongside the design developed with Rhea Sodhi, helped me make clearer decisions. The difficult lesson was that leaving a work out can be an act of care for the exhibition as a whole.
RR: Having presented What Was Here?, what are you exploring next in your artistic practice?
ADS: Presenting What Was Here? has clarified the questions I want to pursue next. I am interested in how textile can become architecture through tension, suspension and the openings it defines.
I want to develop larger sculptural pieces in which the viewer’s movement and changing viewpoint become integral to the work. Working at that scale will allow me to explore material memory through the relationship between a fragile surface, the space it occupies, and the body encountering it.
The next body of work is still emerging. I want its forms to develop through sustained experimentation, giving the materials time to challenge and extend my thinking.