![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Kulpreet-Singh-Film-Still-from-Indelible-Black-Marks-2022-24-Courtesy-the-Artist-and-Galerie-Mirchandani-Steinruecke3-1230x640.png\")
The Punjabi artist’s work transposes the rural environment of protest to something more ambiguous in the gallery space
\n\n\n\nA bench covered in hay is arranged to face a black monochrome pentaptych (Painting 7, 2025). Behind it, an insulated screening room, also complete with makeshift hay bales and straw-padded walls, is showing Punjabi artist Kulpreet Singh’s eight-minute film Indelible Black Marks (2022–24). As the UK rolls into its third heatwave of the summer, this small exhibition piles on to the lurking feeling of eco-anxiety.
\n\n\n\nThe five canvases that make up Painting 7 form a neat uninterrupted horizontal black streak across an otherwise empty white wall. Their gritty ash-, smoke- and dirt-stained surfaces offer a variety of textured reliefs: some harsh like sandpaper, some rich and contrasted like patterns brushed into velvet. Despite its earthy medium, the work is strikingly tidy, and it takes the distressing soundtrack – sirens, heartbeats and heavy breathing, the sound of protests, the aggressive crackle of fire – spilling over from the nearby film to suggest an underlying violence.
\n\n\n\nIndelible Black Marks was originally released in clips on social media to accompany recent farmer revolts in India against the proposed ‘Farm Acts’, in which the artist (who is also a farmer) and some of the performers took part. This context is lost in the gallery, where the film takes centre stage and is accessorised with straw furniture that emanates a faint smell of mulch and comes off, in this pristine air-conditioned room, as Marie Antoinette-style farmer cosplay. Displaced from the environment of protest, the work’s emphasis shifts from a specific struggle against a government to an ambiguous relationship between people and land.
\n\n\n\nThe film captures men dressed in white running across burning fields, carrying long strips of white canvas behind them that collect dirt as they are dragged across the ground, first in straight, parallel lines, then one behind the other in a carefully choreographed circle. At times the men move arduously like cattle ploughing the earth, at others fast like warriors going into battle. In a later scene, the now-dirtied strips of canvas are shown stretched flat across the ground as if to bandage the damaged earth. As the camera pans across them, it reveals drawings of a gun, a wolf, a tree, a bird, then performers lying still as though killed or held hostage by the weapon-bearing illustrated figures that surround them. A reference, perhaps, to the farmers who died and were detained during the revolts. There’s palpable anger but also care and respect in this portrayal of what appears as both a destructive war against an invisible enemy and a celebration of agricultural labour.
\n\n\n\nMost striking is the opening aerial drone shot of crop rows progressively set ablaze until the whole field fades to black, reduced to dirt, ash and smoke. The exhibition text explains that this is ‘the ritual of stubble burning’, which was ‘adopted commercially during the Green Revolution in India in the 1960s’ (a top-down development strategy that also incentivised monocropping and the use of harmful pesticides to fight famine and generally boost productivity). Unless you’re already familiar with this practice and its history, this isn’t obvious. And it’s difficult, in the London context, to see these burning fields and greying skies and not to think instead about the catastrophic wildfires currently raging through Europe, decimating hectares of land and causing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. This slip in interpretation is less a failure of the work than a consequence of its reframing, which sublimates the active power struggle into a (apparently) perpetrator-less atmosphere of despair.
\n\n\n\nKulpreet Singh, Indelible Black Marks, HENI Project Space, Hayward Gallery, London, 16 June – 2 August
\n\n\n\nFrom the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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