THERE WILL BE PAINTING IN DARK TIMES

Aban Raza’s new canvases at a Delhi gallery recalls various geographies of struggle — from MKSS activism, the Maruti stir to Shaheen Bagh. They foreground the politics of assembly, but also the unglamorous intervals.

- PRACHI SATRAWAL

THE first encounter of Aban Raza’s new exhibition ‘Nothing Human Is Alien to Me’ at Galerie Mirchandani + Stein-ruecke feels almost theatrical, a wall-sized eruption of colour and bodies, a shamiana rendered with the scale and force of a public mural. Raza’s exhibition (on till December 15) shared the space with a conversation with the founder members of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, and Shankar Singh on its launch day on November 29.

Raza, a Delhi-based artist, stages protest and pause in the same breath, painting a visual vocabulary of crowds in the eight works on display. “The location could be interchangeable, from Singhu border on the edge of Delhi to Shaheen Bagh to Bhim in Rajasthan, but in every case, the workers’ presence speaks of a churn and an insistent message for change,” writes Gayatri Sinha in the curatorial note.

Known for her uncompromising depictions of contemporary resistance movements, Raza disarms with candour: “Why do I paint this? Because how can you not paint this?”

The exhibition pivots between intimate interiors and expansive public gatherings. In the tent painting titled Maruti Suzuki Struggle Committee, IMT Chowk, Manesar Tehsil, Haryana (2024), bundles of blankets, durries and personal objects become memorials of an evicted protest site. A deliberate emphasis is placed on the blankets, sent in solidarity by workers from a nearby blanket factory who themselves could not join the protest. The choice of what to paint, and how, reveals how consciously each element is rendered. For instance, the Palestinian flag or its colours appear across most of her works, a symbol Raza has integrated since 2012 as an assertion of remembering and solidarity.