What Remains Tender

We do not always know, at the time, which moments will stay with us. A memory of a fire. Branches by the side of a road. We move on, as one does, and yet something in us has already begun the quiet work of holding on, selecting, without quite meaning to, what will be carried forward and what will be allowed to recede.

It is this quality of accumulated retention that seems to run beneath both bodies of work presented in “What Remains Tender,” though the two artists, Samim Alam Beg and Vivek V C, have arrived at it by rather different means.

Alam Beg's practice began with the small and the overlooked. The vein structure of a leaf, the geometry of a cobweb, forms encountered by chance in the margins of daily life. Over the years, these observations were translated into fired clay, rendered permanent, given a material life they were never meant to have. There is something quietly insistent about this. As though the artist understood, earlier than most of us do, that the things we do not quite stop to examine are often the ones most worth examining. The large wall-mounted stoneware work presented here, fragmented across thirty-one pieces and held loosely by a grid, enacts this understanding at scale. Up close, each piece holds its own. From a distance, the eye reaches across the gaps, searching for a resolution that does not arrive.

Vivek works in the space of what cannot be recovered, and what, despite everything, is not lost.

His body of work concerns a fire that happened before he was born at his grandmother's childhood home. Of everything Alzheimer's has quietly taken from her, this particular memory has remained, returning with a vividness that seems almost to deepen with time.

In “What Remains Tender”, he does not reconstruct the event. Instead, he attends to what lingers around it: walls marked by heat and water, kitchen interiors imagined as strange or partially consumed, ordinary objects that no longer feel entirely ordinary. Working across drawing, photography, print transfer, and stop-motion imagery, he traces how a single remembered moment can slowly colonise the present. How a kitchen, a terrain, a caught flame can become inseparable from a past no one living fully witnessed. His print transfer works are worn and surrendered, in part, to the making.

What connects these two practices is a refusal to look away. A willingness to stay with things others have moved past. Both harbour a kind of patience that knows what endures is rarely what we intended to preserve, and that texture is where time leaves its mark.

Fire, for one, is where making begins. For the other, it is where a story has never quite ended.

This is the first time their work has been shown together.

Text by Shreya Ajmani