VANISHING ACTS

From missing people to the hidden struggles of women and modern cyber crimes, Delhi artist Ranjan Kaul’s ongoing exhibition ‘Within, Without’ brings often-overlooked stories into view

- ADITHI REENA AJITH

A disappearance isn’t just about the vanishing of a body. It erases the name, the story, and, in fact, the very existence of the person they were in society till the moment of disappearance. Delhi artist Ranjan Kaul’s ongoing exhibition ‘Within, Without: Tales of Evanescence’ (sixth edition), at Okhla’s Urban Fringe, brings together his oeuvre, grappling with stories of child abduction, sexual assault, the exploitation of sex workers, migration, and the hidden scars of life.

The show, inaugurated on September 19 at Bikaner House, features over 30 figurative paintings, woodcuts, sculptures, and collages, created since his last exhibition in 2024. “When I visited his studio, I could see he was a man on a mission,” says Ina Puri, curatorial advisor of the show. “These weren’t random images. It’s the story of the human being.”

Kaul, an engineer by training and editor at Oxford University Press, turned to painting full-time in 2017. A large part of his work revolves around sex workers, missing women, and those forced into silence. They are drawn partly from newspaper cuttings and social media notifications, and partly from his own imagination.

In his mixed-media work ‘Lost Girl’, Kaul collages cuttings from newspaper ads of missing young girls and women, layering them over the painted image of a smiling girl. The girl's face is gradually consumed by the clippings—a stark reminder of how silence engulfs the missing.