Tandra: Mapping the Unseen 

by Bansri Om Chavda 

Tandra is not sleep. 

It is not wakefulness either. 

It is the flickering mind space in between—the glitch of consciousness as it shifts.  

Abhishek Pandey’s work finds its playground here. 

Rooted in the alleys of Varanasi and the silent relics of Sarnath, his practice walks the fine line between sacred structure and intuitive memory. 

Tandra—that soft Sanskrit word that describes the meditative state between waking and dreaming—becomes not an atmosphere that holds his work. 

Much like the layered architecture of a dream within a dream, Abhishek’s drawings and sculptures emerge as psychic blueprints—mapping emotional terrain, tracing energetic flows. 

Clay, wire, and line become mediums of remembrance. His forms feel familiar, but their arrangement disorients—like turning a corner in the city and finding a temple where you expected a shop, or an echo where you expected silence. 

There’s a subtle dialogue here with the philosophy of movie  Inception—not in its cinematic drama, but in the slow drift between real and imagined. His cityscapes are both inner and outer, drawn from streets walked daily, and yet shaped by time, memory, and the sleepy glitch. 

Each artwork is a portal. 

Tandra listens, it grasps pause between what is seen and what is sensed. 

And in doing so, it offers a deeper architecture— 

Not just of space, but of perception itself. 

Come closer. 

The streets are still speaking.