What is it to have a self right now — observed before you have finished forming, measured as you move, narrated by others before you can narrate it yourself? The Self, Speaking gathers six artists working in terracotta and plaster, oil, charcoal, and abstraction, each turning that question over in her own material and her own voice.

The artists here are all women, and womanhood is the ground this exhibition stands on. Its question lies a layer deeper, and squarely in the present: how a person holds on to a real self in a moment that watches, edits, and quantifies it at every turn.

That watching surfaces most directly in Mansha Bedi’s fragmented terracotta and plaster faces — eyes, ears, and broken busts that hold many selves at once — and in her work on the body as a site of constant commentary, where remarks made “out of care” become a form of surveillance. It returns, quieter, in Avani Bakaya’s oils: figures seen from above, asleep or dissociating on ornamental carpets, caught mid-thought in moments of private stillness. In Nisha Manavi — whose name, Nishan, means mark or trace — the self is what it leaves behind: imprints, residues, the evidence of having passed through a place.

For others, the self is inseparable from the city that shapes it. Sangeeta Grover reads Delhi as a lattice of wires, grills, and windows, its structured disorder pressing in on the body that moves through it. Sangeeta Singh deconstructs local scenes into a surreal parallel space where shadows feel more real than the forms that cast them, and where being among others carries its own solitude. Shivani Garg lets all of this dissolve into pastel abstraction — fluid thought given form, a self in soft and constant motion, always taking new shape.

Across these registers the show makes a single wager: that selfhood is something continually made — fragmented, situated, alive to its moment. At the preview, the artist Preeti Singh adds a further voice to this chorus, her poetry offering the exhibition another native language for the interior life.

Preview 1st July, 12 pm, Art Explore, New Delhi · July 2026

Mansha Bedi, Avani Bakaya, Nisha Manavi, Shivani Garg, Sangeeta Singh and Sangeeta Grover.

Artwork; Mansha Bedi