Making Meanings Of Our Own

“It began with surrender: keeping a notebook and torch by the bed, scribbling half-coherent visions at 3 am. Over years, patterns emerged—doorways, eye tree, mouth like portals, endless chases through visceral landscapes, benevolent beings assisting me to fly or seek this hidden knowledge —and I realised these weren’t just my symbols, but shared mythologies”– Ruchi Bakshi Sharma

Cabinets of curiosities, shelves turned into totems, frames that create portals into a surreal world encapsulates ‘Three Times as Dream’. Artists Ruchi Bakshi Sharma and Sanjeev Sharma turn the material world on its head, into a theatrical stage of dreams. Their show is a collection of the visual narratives that were created during Ruchi’s dream time. Over the years of dream keeping, many astonishing patterns became visible, with constantly increasing richness.

Often surrealistic in nature, unexpected events and mysterious transformations created an uncanny space-time continuum—making her question the very nature of reality. A passion project which was three years in the making, Ruchi becomes a guide into a dream world. Her artworks showcase the fragments of the dreams she had visualised, documented and been obsessed with. The folkloresque quality of her visuals creates drama that unfolds in a metaphysical space. As one looks at the artworks, intangible and fluid as they are, the drama unravels. The meaning and the mythmaking that goes on in one's head as one experiences the works, is dreamlike. 

Through a collection of cabinets, dioramas, dollhouses, lenticular prints, intricate mirror screens, and moving-image works, 'Three Times as Dream' invites viewers into a world that is fluid, theatrical, and steeped in the language of the subconscious. This quality of recreating a dream, not only of her own but a shared co-inhabiting world, personal yet open to the public, is very important in the artist duo’s work. The paintings are not endpoints with establishing narratives in themselves, but blueprints for experiences. Fragments that create a sense of a journey through the artist’s dreamworld, simultaneously creating one for our own. The concepts of linearity, time and the physical realm change as one goes through wonder, play and shock . It’s a game that Ruchi wants to play with viewers, a hide and seek of mystery and revelation . 

Symbols play a crucial role in her works. They reveal themselves gradually into the dream world. Incorporated in wooden materials that we come across in the real world, the furniture pieces create a compelling duality—inner versus outer worlds, dream versus reality, art versus utility.

Melding utility with allegory, both excavate hidden narratives. The exhibition’s debut aligns with the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist movement, echoing its legacy of probing the unconscious and redefining reality. However, Ruchi aims to render dream space not as abstraction, but as habitat.

She says, "Dreams are the mind’s most ancient language, yet they speak in riddles we’ve forgotten how to decipher. By externalising these visions—giving form to the formless—I’m not just sharing a diary, but inviting others to recognize their own subconscious glyphs. The ‘intimate’ becomes universal when we realise how often our dreams borrow the same archetypes, the same fractured geometries. Surrealism taught us that privacy is an illusion; the unconscious is a collective territory.” Ruchi explains the way she conceived one of her artworks. A reading table, an everyday object, is transformed into a portal of the dream world. She says she would find her study table a space of constriction, a space that doesn’t allow a child to wonder, but to subserviently follow a path. She wanted to gift this artwork to her childhood self, creating a new material, changing its meaning and the way its use is perceived.

This urge of making a world for her viewers to rethink and reimagine runs deep in Ruchi. She says, “Your Netflix is in your own head”, stressing how important yet inaccessible the world of fantastical imagination is for the younger generation today. The absence of folklore, nature, visual diversity and overemphasis on succeeding in the real world has robbed us of the ability to fantasise.

This exhibition wants to open us up to that often forgotten and neglected world. We forget the intuited knowledge that dreams can present, and the fact that it’s a memory and a reality that we are conjuring within our self. The exhibition is a journey into a world beyond logical consciousness, of memories that can slip away if we try to hold on to them too hard. It's not meaning that is sought, but an experience to be felt. The space itself becomes a metaphor for the mind—layered, contradictory, luminous. Bending reality into the personal narrative, one can become one's own protagonist in this space and create one's own meanings.