THREE TIMES AS DREAM
‘Three times as Dream’ is an immersive show that delves into the liminal realms of dreams, blending surreal visual narratives with functional art. Part waking dream, part metaphysical archive—it invites viewers to traverse the porous borders between sleep and consciousness, memory and myth.
Ruchi Bakshi Sharma devotedly chronicles her own nocturnes, transcribes the subconscious through drawings that spiral into labyrinthine worlds—each a palimpsest of archetypes, thresholds, and metamorphic echoes. Her work is rooted in years of research into dream psychology and South Asian mythological traditions. She makes lenticular prints: limited edition works using layered lens technology that creates images shifting and revealing depth as you move before them. Every image is hand-drawn individually over many days. The lenticular medium requires digital preparation — the same way a musician uses a recording studio. Shadow boxes: three-dimensional assemblages in reclaimed teakwood frames — each one a container for a recurring archetypal character from the dream journal. Dream furniture: cabinets, dioramas and assemblages designed to hold the interior world of a specific dream. And optical toys: handmade kinetic objects based on Victorian optical principles, sold and used in workshops with children. Her work has been shown at the India Art Fair ( Invited by Sudarshan Shetty - 2018, 2019 ), Serendipity Arts Festival Goa (Invited by Sneha Khanwalkar 2019), Galerie Krinzinger/ Projekte Vienna (2017–18), One World Foundation Sri Lanka (2017), and GALLERYSKE Bangalore (2017). Her experimental films have screened at festivals in Japan, the US, Canada and Bangladesh. She has taught courses at the National Institute of Design Ahmedabad, Parsons ISDI Mumbai; Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, Xavier’s Institute of Communication, and IIT Mumbai.
The Wave of Fortune
Just as her drawings dissect the psyche’s buried symbols, his sculptures dissect the ghosts in our city’s walls. Echoing the exhibition’s themes of colonial memory, surreal functionality, and the dialogue between art and design. Sanjeev says, “Furniture is architecture’s intimate ghost because a chair remembers the body it holds and a cabinet guards the secrets it’s imbibed. In this body of work, we’ve unstitched time so the beholder feels like they are stepping into a collective unconscious. We arranged works as thresholds—mirrors facing drawings to create infinite regress, dollhouses lit like reliquaries. Guiding viewers through a labyrinth where every turn blurred the line between their memories and ours, the space itself became a metaphor for the layered and luminous mind.
"I make objects for the unconscious. The lenticulars shift as you move past them — the image changes depending on where you stand. The shadow boxes hold recurring characters from my dreams: archetypal figures I've been in conversation with for twenty years. The dream material is housed within sculptural forms that hold the interior world of a dream. These are not decorative objects. They are the kind of things people pass down."
— Ruchi Bakshi Sharma
“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 realized these weren’t just my symbols, but shared mythologies. The methodology became ritualistic: transcribe the dream, distill its emotional core, then materialize it through the most uncanny medium. A dream of floating cities became a mobile of cut parchment; a nightmare of silent screams birthed a soundless film loop. The artmaking was a séance, and I was merely the medium.”
- Ruchi
Strikingly, the exhibition’s debut aligns with the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist movement, echoing its legacy of probing the unconscious and redefining reality. The uncanny resonance to the centenary conjures André Breton’s Manifesto anew, asking: What if the brain’s most private theatre staged its visions for all to witness?Both movements share a creed: to plumb the unconscious, to let the irrational sculpt reality. Yet Ruchi pushes further, rendering dreamspace not as abstraction, but as habitat. To step into her world is to wander a mind mid-reverie.
"Dreams are the mind’s most ancient language, yet they speak in riddles we’ve forgotten how to decipher. By externalizing 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 realize how often our dreams borrow the same archetypes, the same sacred geometries. Surrealism taught us that privacy is an illusion; the unconscious is actually a collective territory.”