UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Daughters of a Sikh doctor who immigrated to North England from the Punjab, the London-born artists Amrit and Rabindra Singh are identical twins: they have the same DNA, they look and sound exactly alike, they wear the same clothing, and they received their training in art together. Often referred to as “The Singh Twins,” the sisters have adopted the language of Indian and Persian miniature painting to depict the complex urban and domestic landscapes of the contemporary world. The twins have exhibited their work to international audiences in Britain, Europe, India, and North America: a recent show, titled “Past Modern: The Singh Twins,” featured more than sixty paintings, and was hosted by UC Riverside in 2003 and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 2005. Significantly, Amrit and Rabindra’s collaborative practice is not simply an innocent expression of an affectionate bond between sisters, but rather a self-conscious engagement with the notion of singular authorship and the cult of the individual that has pervaded post-Enlightenment art historical tradition. Not since Diane Arbus’ 1967 black-and-white photograph of identical twin girls in New Jersey has such a memorable rendering of sameness and belonging, normativity and exclusion, and identity and difference, been sustained so provocatively within the contemporary art world.