On view at APRE Art House in Mumbai until July 4, 2026, UBIK’s ‘Gaps In My Resume’ marks the conceptual artist’s first exhibition in eight years. Through sculpture, text, neon signage, and industrial materials, the exhibition offers a rare critique of the art world’s opaque structures, exposing the role of secondary markets, aspiration, and social performance in shaping contemporary artistic value.
What happens when an artist steps back from the contemporary “art scene” for eight years, only to return with a biting critique of the same “scene” that once lifted them to the limelight?
The result looks a lot like New Delhi-based conceptual artist Vivek Premachandran aka UBIK’s ‘Gaps In My Resume’ — their first solo exhibition in India. On view at APRE Art House’s Colaba space in Mumbai until July 4, 2026, the exhibition marks an inflexion point in UBIK’s practice, which has long occupied the margins of India’s contemporary art ecosystem while critically examining its opaque, impenetrable structures.
Largely self-taught and working outside the contemporary art ecosystem, UBIK views the art world as a capitalist system shaped by markets, aspiration, and social performance. Using texts, images, videos, and sculptures, their practice interrogates objects and the environments they inhabit, moving fluidly across the spheres of the art-making process.
In ‘Gaps In My Resume’, the artist turns this critical gaze inward, using sculpture, text, and material interventions to examine the often-unspoken mechanisms that govern artistic production, value, and legitimacy in the contemporary art world. Through short, satirical texts, neon signage, and polyester banners that are at once incisive and humorous, UBIK explores the contradictions of contemporary culture, creating works whose aesthetics mirror the systems, aspirations, and performances they seek to question.
The exhibition’s title refers both to the artist’s prolonged absence from exhibiting and to broader questions of visibility, success, and participation within the contemporary art industry. Using a body of work that mimics the visual language of the secondary art market — such as standardised forms, near-luxurious finishes, and the aesthetic of aspiration just short of attainment — UBIK exposes the systems of aspiration and consensus that underpin cultural economies.
UBIK’s practice is a rare example of institutional critique in South Asia, its tone at times ironic and confessional, at times withholding and oracular.Mustafa Khanbai, Curator
Using materials such as brass, iron, and red oxide chosen for their tendency to oxidise and deteriorate, this body of work functions as metaphors for institutions that appear permanent and authoritative yet remain vulnerable to erosion. Red oxide, a recurring material from the artist’s youth between Dubai and Delhi, is recontextualised here as both an instrument of memory and critique — freed from its utilitarian purpose and allowed to age, corrode, and transform.
UBIK’s works resemble fragments of overheard conversations — wry observations, rumours, and half-confessions — that reveal the social rituals underlying the art world. As Mustafa Khanbai notes in his curatorial essay, the artist’s practice occupies a space between irony and complicity, inviting viewers to recognise their own participation within these systems.
‘Gaps In My Resume’, the first solo exhibition in India by UBIK, and their first show anywhere in eight years, is on view till July 4, 2026. Learn more here.
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