Mumbai, June 2026: APRE Art House, Colaba, is pleased to present 'Gaps In My Resume', the first solo exhibition in India by the artist UBIK, and their first show anywhere in eight years.
The exhibition brings to Mumbai a practice that is as uncommon as it is urgent: institutional critique made tangible through object, material, and a studied refusal to behave.
Institutional critique is rare in the Indian art world. UBIK's return breaks that silence with wit and precision. Self-taught, UBIK reads the art market as a system- and quietly exposes it through object and material.
Their text works feel like fragments of conversations you were not meant to hear. The exhibition, with a curatorial introduction by Mustafa Khanbhai, locates UBIK's practice at the precise intersection of irony and complicity- the sidelong glance, the nudge, the overheard sentence at a party that suddenly explains everything.
The works in Gaps In My Resume simulate the language of the secondary market- standardised forms, near-luxurious finishes, the aesthetic of aspiration just short of attainment. In brass and iron that oxidise when left unattended, UBIK finds materials that mirror the art world's own susceptibility to erosion: surfaces that appear sealed, permanent, and prestigious until time and neglect reveal otherwise. The red oxide of UBIK's childhood reappears here, relieved of its domestic function, allowed at last to rust.
Together, the works invite viewers not merely to observe a system but to recognise themselves within it. Eight years is a gap worth asking about. So is a debut. For a market that rarely turns the lens on itself, 'Gaps In My Resume' offers something genuinely rare: an art world exhibition that treats the art world as its subject.
Text By Mustafa Khanbai-
For better or worse, the market is always in the room with us. Institutional critique is rare in the Indian art world, with its private offshore economy, identity fixations and formulaic production. This strategy of never rocking the boat, lest opportunities be missed is why the infrastructure which makes up the art world is described only by visitors to an exhibition, almost never by the work itself.
UBIK is not a product of Indian art institutions, but a self-taught designer and artist who has always seen the art world as a set of relations formed around a market rather than the other way around. Consciously mimicking a secondary market's attempts to standardise and duplicate forms within strict design parameters, UBIK's work simulates the nearly luxurious, the first copy, the midpoint between aspiration and practicality that forms the backbone of consumer culture today. They are drawn to materials such as brass and iron that oxidise when left without care, faltering over time to reveal a very human susceptibility to erosion and corrosion that become apparent only after it is too late.
Here, the artist's hand is largely absent. It is otherwise occupied, holding a glass of wine perhaps, scrolling on a phone, gesticulating, or stroking a chin. For a conceptual artist, especially one so immersed in institutional critique, this is the role of the hand: to be conscious of itself, to simultaneously indicate its ubiquity, its banality and its performance, pointing out by implication all the little rituals and understandings that constitute the system it inhabits. The conceptual core of UBIK's vocabulary is this place of irony and complicity, signified by the sidelong glance, the nudge, a gesture at the intricate origami of discretion and denial in a world of surfaces. This gesture is simultaneously sardonic and confessional, inviting the viewer to take part in a discourse made entirely of whispers and undertones. Their text works feel like snatches from conversations overheard at parties, a reality whose truest shape is fragmented gossip, disclosure and deferred admission.
Instead of lamenting the issues with the art market and its social world as grievances, UBIK acknowledges them as fundamental properties that are not so much resolved as managed, organised into suitable forms with boundaries shaped by consensus. The formation of this consensus, and the corrosive effect it has on an artist's jagged practice, is a productive site of negotiation. It is where the rust and red oxide do their work, not always corroding but also curing, settling in, forming new surfaces, evoking landscapes that we encounter long after they have been emptied. Or are they perhaps an evening out, billions of years of scarring and healing averaged into a single composite image?
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In this sense, time is a filter that purifies the raw material — or an artist, a role, a practice — into its final form. In the strange arithmetic of conflicting intentions, the distinction between a product and a remainder can become blurred. The corroded yet sealed surfaces, and the apologetic yet complicit artist, are both debris and intended result, produced by seemingly immutable processes.
There is also an element of relief in this state of uncategorised limbo, of objects being freed from the contractual obligations we would call function or propriety. The red oxide, a familiar part of UBIK's childhood / home, is relieved of this domestic burden, the iron is allowed to settle into rust after being held sealed off from the air for so long, and we are left to consider the faint selfhood of these objects, the things that they mimic, and the signs of human handling that give them their small stories. Such stories are exciting in much the same way as overheard conversations, accidental by themselves but zoom out and you have a pattern.
This zooming out is both entry and exit for UBIK. You are meant to step back, allow yourself to be taken out of the moment so that the slightly ridiculous idiosyncrasies of the polished spaces around you are suddenly apparent. UBIK's practice is a door left slightly ajar, a sliver of space that manages to contain a vast landscape, quietly folding in on itself. UBIK reminds us that this trepidation on the threshold is the price of self-awareness; participating in a system of obfuscation means that it will necessarily be disconcerting, even awkward, to be confronted with an image of yourself as one of its agents..
Text by Upasana Das-
Three steel plates engraved in red spew up self-congratulatory affirmations emerging deep from the recesses of the art market, for the contemporary art worker.
“Smile!,” one urges, “You’re a conceptual artist.” Another prods. “Smile!, You’re on a panel.” Scrolling down UBIK’s Instagram, it isn’t hard to excavate these lines from a series of posts he had made earlier this year. While they still exist within the familiar cuboid form of the social feed – their digital movement appears to have been arrested in the sterile white cube of Apre Art at his show titled ‘Gaps in My Resume’ – where they eerily exert their satire on the knowing artist and the unassuming gallery intern giving a walkthrough.
If I wasn’t in Dubai at the time I was, I probably wouldn’t be an artist. When I was there, only one or two galleries had opened up. I would do graffiti and street art alongside running a design studio and underground art magazine with my brother. After I curated a show for Traffic gallery run by the curator Rami Farooq, he became my friend. A few years later I was talking to him about wanting to shift mediums and he pointed out how I use text in my work and mentioned conceptual artists working with text. Then I would see Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger in someone’s private collection up close.”
While textuality arrived in Kruger’s work through advertising and Holzer’s with posters and modern computer systems, for UBIK text came through social networks laden with the promise of early millennial internet. Those platforms became his testing ground exploring communicative possibilities[1] that catalogued the irreverence, held the realisations and snarky in-medias-res of art-making during a global recession. Neither was he alone considering the rise of art world meme accounts like Avocado Ibuprofen, artreviewpower100 and POSTPOSTPOST – and this discerning minimal language was carried into his practice through his early works to his final show in 2018 consisting of fifty-five works, which was completely online and is on view till perpetuity.
“I’m a child of the internet. I don’t take social media seriously and it becomes an interesting way to disarm yourself. It’s a playground.”
Texts within UBIK’s world of short-attention-spanned digitality coldly pauses, feeling for humour-laced skittishness in its viewers. It perhaps goes back to the time he stood before John Baldessari’s text paintings at an Art Dubai booth, which he was designing in the late 2000s. As an art industry worker supporting his own creative practice through graphic designing for the art world, he returns to the sardonic humour in the conceptual artist’s rebuttal against market driven codes of art appreciation and valuation, which furthered an argument put forth by a generation of conceptual artists critiquing institutional frameworks [4]. “Generally speaking,” Baldessari would write cynically in acrylic in ‘Tips for Artists who want to Sell’ (1966 – 68), “Paintings with light colours sell more quickly than paintings with dark colours.”
“I was drawn to conceptual art as I saw it primacy of the idea – which is then executed in really playful formats. A little after that I would sign with Sabrina Amrani’s gallery and I was with them for a decade. ‘Rant’ was one of my earliest text works and it was a real cash cow – I sold about eight-percent of all those works and my previous gallery kept wanting me to work on them more. However, my practice was getting more conceptual and after 2018 I thought it doesn’t make sense for my practice to be part of a roster in a gallery within the system.”
It was a careful balance of restrain and roiling tension that threatened to spill over in UBIK’s ‘Autosuggestions’ (2012) where unlike the intentional visual overstimulation which accompanied Holzer’s ‘Light Lines’, the unsuspecting – and probably tired – viewer is lulled into a false sense of security with plush sofas surrounding LED sticker tapes. A few glowing red letters looped endlessly mimicking electronic boards marking anxious time in train stations. Here, they’re not without bite as in the swiftly growing economy of Sharjah, they sharply goaded the exhausted corporate worker, “Are you earning what you’re worth?”
At APRE such sentences slice up his practice clinically into sharp sentences and lines them up on steel plates – vertically, as he had long done on social media – egging on the casual urban art collector installing his work within their spaces, “My practice is best described as a topic that aims to compliment your dinner table conversations.”
“When I put up a show, I like making fifty percent works which don’t sell – or are impossible to collect. When I initially imagined this show, I was thinking of recreating this work from my last show ‘Dear’ in 2018. Ten television screens playing the fifty-five videos in a loop. The whole show was on Instagram – but then, how do you sell an Instagram account and how does a collector display it? I like thinking through these approaches.”
Even while UBIK gave up his creative practice after detaching himself from the commerciality of the gallery circuit almost ten years ago, now he is forced to confront the tension and necessity of commerciality within his practice to cover his production costs.
Almost referring back to Lebanese visual artist Charbel-Joseph H Boutros’s ‘Three abstractions on Three histories’ (2016) once installed at Grey Noise in Dubai which he would often visit as he was friends with the curator, UBIK takes the generational lineage infused in the three shirts Boutros hangs from a metallic clothesline and instead places it in a very saleable context through a line of shirts printed with two lines about his practice from his socials – practice as dank meme artist statements which collapse into collectibles.
“When I’m critiquing the art world, I’m critiquing myself first, as being complicit within this system.”
Crimson is a recurring colour throughout the gallery in laser-cut text or swathes of red oxide on a series of what happens to be colourfield works set on the ground[6]. Red ground undulates across every single piece, almost waiting to be rearranged within the order of a linear landscape like a puzzle. Cement board skies loom grey holding ominous weight in stillness. Another landscape work ‘Slow Lines’ (2026) hangs on the wall but the skies here are tinted vibrant orange like a drowning sun at dusk with otherworldly pinpricks of unidentified airborne objects making the atmosphere appear like a culture blooming in a petri dish, caught under a microscope.
“My childhood was in Kerala and I travelled by trains a lot – all I saw was landscape and red soil. Our home had red oxide flooring. I grew up in a factory warehouse in Dubai around industrial materials for most of my life. Machines which would make nuts and bolts and bend metal. I grew up seeing tanks being built where red oxide was used as a primer – protective coating – for the metal to stop rusting. It became embedded into me.”
Decades into his practice, UBIK realised he was serendipitously using every material his father was using as a fabricator constructing petrol pumps in Sharjah. A young Vivek Premachandran was surrounded with red oxide that his father used for coating machinery, preventing rust, as he was growing up in the latter’s twenty-thousand-feet warehouse.
Drawn to American sculptor Richard Serra whose work in steel mills made him rethink the very form that steel took, magnified, and play with the stoicism of hard metal in public space through movement, UBIK saw his material as concepts. The heaviness of support systems laid out as brass, iron and metal hooks, barely noticeable in the ceiling in the gallery. A simple line of red implied a landscape and mounds of red oxide on rusted Idli moulds shapeshifted into natural structures around his home in lush Kerala. While red oxide is traditionally used for kaavi kale murals on the Konkan coast, UBIK treats colour as pure application – exactly like a fabricator. [7]
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[1] (Walkthrough Smile)
[2] (Friends with the Curator)
[3] Some days as I scroll through the landscape that Avocado Ibuprofen documents, I feel like Pallasvuo has found the most viable art format for the moment, a purposefully ephemeral, ruthlessly self-critical vehicle for inhabiting the feed and examining it at the same time. It’s a world in which “all old forms of culture had been disrupted and demonetized to hell” (as one 2021 strip puts it), and there’s no “appealing medium” left within the exhausted and discredited apparatus of the contemporary art system. (Plague Medicine: Reading Avocado Ibuprofen in a Pandemic | Momus. 17 Mar. 2022, momus.ca/2022/03/17/plague-medicine-reading-avocado-ibuprofen-in-a-pandemic)
[4] Artists associated with the movement attempted to bypass the increasingly commercialised art world by stressing thought processes and methods of production as the value of the work. The art forms they used were often intentionally those that do not produce a finished object such as a sculpture or painting. This meant that their work could not be easily bought and sold and did not need to be viewed in a formal gallery situation. (Sol Lewitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum Vol.5, no. 10, Summer 1967, pp. 79-83
[5] (Friends with curator)
[6] “He discovered that if he brought the artworks off the wall, with enough depth, they weren't paintings, they weren't reliefs. they were something new and these works which follow a progression of space and volume with a reversing of both, was his way of organising the space in a self-evident way,” Thaddaeus Ropac. “Donald Judd | Curated by Flavin Judd | 2019.” YouTube, 19 Nov. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7FRmhsTghE.
[7] John Griffiths: Are you ‘an artist’?
Donald Judd: Oh yes! And sculpture’s very much a part of me — fabrication.
Griffiths: You’re a fabricator then, but you’re not a maker of myths, are you?
Judd: Oh no! No myths. Just a fabricator.
Singer, Jill. “Donald Judd: On His Use of Color and Defining ‘Modernism.’” Sight Unseen, 22 Aug. 2016, www.sightunseen.com/2016/08/rare-donald-judd-interview-color-and-modernism.
