As we enter a moment of deep collective strife, Sudhir Pandey—artist, astrologer, and art history belligerent—returns with his second solo showing of Transits. A Saturn transit is a seven-and-a-half-year cycle, when Saturn moves across one’s natal Moon. This exhibition marks Pandey’s second such cycle.

Back in 1995, during his first Saturn return, Pandey presented Artist Critic Nexus & International Art Fallacy at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda. That exhibition was a cautionary note to his peers—young artists drawn into the booby-traps of fame, art-market formulas, mimicry, plagiarism, and the seductive glare of an “international art circus.” The same year, Surat battled an outbreak of the bubonic plague, and Pandey began to recognize how fear and collective anxiety mirror epidemics—an observation renewed after the Covid lockdowns, when he saw the return of mass panic and authoritarian control.

After his master’s in Baroda, Pandey studied at L’Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts du Mans (1997–98), engaging with conceptual practices through encounters with Christian Boltanski, Anish Kapoor, and Christo & Jeanne-Claude. From then, he began gathering the debris of daily life—sweet wrappers, plastics, magazine pages, photos, stones, wood, string, and cloth. He wrapped them together, layering paint, tape, and astrological charts of their “found” time and place, even mapping them to shortwave radio frequencies. For him, Scotch tape became a metaphor for skin, fragile yet binding.

In his 2005 and 2006 solos at Chatterjee & Lal, Transit I and Radioactive Wrappings, he sharpened his critique of how art is produced and consumed, experimenting with wrapping as a metaphor of containment and leakage.

Nearly two decades later, Wrappings of Transitory Sense evolves this vocabulary. Today Pandey trades Scotch tape for yellow “Caution Tape”—a warning and barrier, but also a signifier of collective risk. His works take the humble A4 sheet as their ground: 9 by 11 inches, the bureaucratic format that regulates human lives through licenses, notices, dismissals, and permissions. What was designed to simplify life now dominates it.

Having taught art for two decades, Pandey recently stepped into astrology full-time, attentive to the pandemic of anxiety defining our times. In Eastern astrology, Saturn—or Shani—is the karmic teacher who forces us to confront unfinished lessons. In his current cycle, Pandey’s wrappings turn radioactive once again, attempting to trace not just radio signals but the chaotic frequencies of human emotion across the virtual sphere—the internet—more erratic and charged than any broadcast wave.

"Where we are most certain, we are most blind". Voltaire 

Sudhir Pandey 

Artist and Astrologist