In his first solo exhibition in Delhi, Abdulla P.A. gathers the overlooked and the fragile into sculptural forms that hover between presence and absence. Working with rusted surfaces, scraps of tin and wood, fruit seeds, loofahs, banana skins, and other remnants of daily life, he reassembles fragments into quiet ecologies of memory.
In his first solo exhibition in Delhi, Abdulla P.A. gathers the overlooked and the fragile into sculptural forms that hover between presence and absence. Working with rusted surfaces, scraps of tin and wood, fruit seeds, loofahs, banana skins, and other remnants of daily life, he reassembles fragments into quiet ecologies of memory.
Each object, weathered and worn, carries the imprint of human touch and time—remnants of childhood play, traces of domestic labor, echoes of kinship networks. What has been discarded returns here, not as debris, but as spectral testimony: things that linger, refusing to disappear, whispering of the lives once entwined with them.
Alongside these assemblages, Abdulla paints portraits of his family members—parents, siblings, kin—onto corroded metal sheets and rusted surfaces. In these works, the terrain of memory is inscribed directly into matter: the likeness of a loved one rests upon a surface marked by erosion and change. The images, never permanent, allow rust to seep through, reminding us that intimacy itself is fragile, fleeting, vulnerable to weather and time. Yet it is precisely in this fragility that tenderness persists.
The exhibition’s title, Ruins of an Embrace, evokes this atmosphere of lingering touch and spectral presence. Abdulla’s gathered materials and portraits are haunted by memory, but never consumed by loss. Instead, they embody the survival of relationships—between kin, between humans and objects, between community and environment. His works are modest in scale yet expansive in resonance, bridging household intimacy with ecological urgency.
In Abdulla’s hands, corrosion is not an end but a form of endurance; rust becomes tenderness; fracture becomes survival. These works remind us that an embrace is never entirely lost—it lingers, ghostlike, in the very materials that once held it.