NEW DELHI: In a contemporary art world that often rewards visibility, scale, and spectacle, Sonika Agarwal’s practice unfolds in deliberate contrast. Her work does not compete for attention; it asks for attunement. This choice is not incidental. For a woman artist working outside institutional grooming and dominant narratives, stillness itself becomes a form of resistance. Agarwal’s solo exhibition What Remains Awake: Dream, Depth, and the Fourth, currently on view at Kalamkar Gallery, Bikaner House, New Delhi (30 January – 10 February 2026), situates this quiet rigor at the centre of its inquiry.
A self-taught artist with over seventeen years of practice, Agarwal’s artistic journey mirrors the layered realities of many women—where creative labour evolves alongside professional responsibility, emotional work, and the constant negotiation of autonomy. Rather than compartmentalising these roles, she allows them to inform her practice organically. The result is a body of work that does not narrate women’s experiences overtly, but absorbs them—through patience, repetition, and inward attention.
Drawing from the Indic framework of consciousness—Jagrat (waking), Swapna (dream), Sushupti (deep sleep), and Turiya, the fourth state beyond cognition—Agarwal offers an alternative vocabulary to dominant, often Western, modes of perception. For women, whose inner lives are frequently undervalued or rendered invisible, this philosophical grounding becomes quietly political. It reclaims interiority as a site of knowledge rather than retreat.
Agarwal’s preference for abstraction further distances her work from the expectations often placed on women artists to explain, narrate, or personalise their experiences. Her paintings, sculptures, and installations resist legibility. Colours shift subtly, forms hover between presence and dissolution, and surfaces hold tension rather than resolution. This refusal to be easily read echoes the emotional labour women carry—felt deeply, articulated rarely, and recognised even less.
Curated by Myna Mukherjee, the exhibition frames Agarwal’s practice within a broader discourse on non-Western epistemologies and embodied perception. Sculptural works such as Vasana: The Architecture of Desire examine how inherited impressions—ambition, longing, restraint—take root within the psyche, particularly within bodies trained to accommodate. Meanwhile, Dominance over the Silence of Ahimsa stages a predator-prey dynamic that reflects on power, vulnerability, and ethical choice, resonating with the gendered realities of control and survival.
These are not declarative feminist gestures, but reflective engagements with agency and restraint—conditions many women navigate daily. Agarwal’s recognition has emerged through persistence rather than patronage. The National Shree Shakti Award, conferred by the President of India, acknowledges not only her artistic contribution but also her role in shaping cultural discourse as a woman working with quiet authority. The recent acquisition of her works by the Museum of Sacred Arts (MOSA), Belgium, further underscores the global relevance of a practice rooted in introspection rather than spectacle.
What Remains Awake ultimately speaks to a distinctly feminine strength—one that listens more than it announces, observes more than it asserts. In a culture that often demands constant visibility and output, Agarwal’s work invites viewers to slow down and encounter states of awareness beyond performance. For women especially, the exhibition affirms a radical proposition: that staying inwardly awake, despite external noise and expectation, is itself an act of power.