Tucked away in the quiet lanes of New Friends Colony, up a stone staircase is the studio of Sonika Agarwal, which unfolds a reiteration of her most recent exhibition, What Remains Awake curated by Myna Mukherjee at Bikaner House Kalamkaar Art Gallery. The exhibition ran from January 30 to February 10, 2026 and was open to many who visited.
However, Sonika has re-conceptualized the works to fit her new studio space, and she has given it a new life and context. The exhibition features her illuminated canvases, that glow in the dark, her sculptural installation of a brain that is lit up from within throwing patters and shadows on the wall, with its coloured lights. Dangling from the ceiling is a unique cluster of bio-morphic forms that that buzz with their own colour tones that come alive in the darkened studio and there is also.
Untitled | Resin, wood and stones | 53 x 27 x 10 inches
“What Remains Awake draws upon the Indic philosophical framework of the four states of consciousness – jagrat (waking), swapna (dream), sushupti (deep sleep), and turiya (the transcendent fourth), as a conceptual structure for an abstract, color-responsive exploration of awareness, perception, and interior life,” says Mukherjee. “Rather than illustrative representation, Agarwal’s practice mobilizes color as a mutable field, one that shifts in relation to light, time, and embodied presence,” she adds.
What we get now as we are present at Sonika’s studio is her engagement with the self in an ever-evolving context. “Over the past twenty years, my journey as an artist has been one of deep listening—both inward and outward. I began with painting as a way to understand emotion and inner states, working intuitively with form, colour, and silence. Early on, my subjects were related to the emotions, status and presence of women in today’s society which evolved further to pointing my own presence in this world questioning as to Who am I?” says Sonika. Now she finds herself exploring sculptural work as well as installation. For the fist time her painting is transformed into an installation taking a viewer on a journey of inner layers of human consciousness.
Her works are not only philosophical but also deeply optical, employing illusion and perceptual shifts to create a hallucinatory mode of viewing. Light allows the artists to speak of transformation, awareness and presence in ways that pigment alone could not. Which is why perceiving her current body of works engages one on several levels of being present and participating in the experience in a truly immersive manner.
“In recent years, my practice has become increasingly experiential and immersive. Art Installation- like “Vasana- The Architecture of Desires” and paintings installations on “What Remains Awake” explore desire, memory, and consciousness as living architectures—spaces that breathe, glow, and respond. The focus has shifted from representation to experience, from object to encounter,” says the artist.
Here the artist is experiementing with colors and lights to make the works more immersive, transforming and experiential making a viewer to have a glimpse of a transendental state.
Set against a kaleidoscopic backdrop, organic forms emerge out of the painterly depths encapsulating the spaces of high-relief and the third-dimension. They speak of a deep cosmic sense of origin, of moving from the state of shunya (zero) to a state of anant (infinity). They awaken one’s consciousness through the tactility and touch as well as sight and sound, where breathing is a manifestation that one becomes aware of in an almost yogic state, cleansing oneself.
Cover image: Life’s Dream | Acrylic on canvas with led light panel | 48 x 60 inches | Courtesy of the artist
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