Political art: Probir Gupta's migrants in the museum speak of a universal experience of inequality, injustice

Probir Gupta; 'In Memory of Shireen Abu Akleh and Other Slain Palestinian Reporters' - front and back (right).

A huge, deconstructed typewriter greets you at the entrance to the Travancore Palace art gallery on Kasturba Gandhi Marg in Lutyens' Delhi. As you go around the sculpture, the iron ribbons and "keys" reveal a broken wooden column with only the ornamental frieze intact. Keep going around to the back, and there's a wooden door that's all but concealed from the front view. On it, there are a dozen or so photo frames that give it the semblance of a shrine.

"Yes, they are photo frames," says artist Probir Gupta in response to a question about this work titled 'In Memory of Shireen Abu Akleh and Other Slain Palestinian Reporters', "but don't give the frames so much importance."

It's impossible not to think about the frames once you've seen them, though. For, photo frames and framing devices return over and over in different contexts and to different ends throughout this exhibition of Gupta's works. Titled 'Migrants in the Museum,' the show was organized by Anant Art Gallery which released the exhibition catalogue on February 11.

Detail from the back of artist Probir Gupta's 'In Memory of Shireen Abu Akleh...' (2019).

Frames and framing devices

Consider the work titled 'Clouds of Steel Memories'. The work itself seems to be quartered, with the upper two (smaller) quadrants showing photo frames, vases, candleholders stacked like they would be in an antiques shop. Fairly orderly and clean. The pictures inside the frames themselves are mostly generic photos of White women/girl models smiling radiantly. The bottom two quadrants could be a steelworks factory. There's the orange smelt, the steely interiors covered in black impasto soot and soot-covered workers, and an overall bleakness that's missing from the pictures above. There's a neat hierarchy, the juxtaposition underlining this generally - and universally - accepted inequality of the many who toil to enable consumerist living by the lucky few.

Clouds of Steel Memories

Detail from 'Clouds of Steel Memories'

The frames and framing devices can also be seen in the 2024 work 'Aspirants', where Gupta has used colonial-era wigs to frame particular kinds of privileged lifestyles in one part of the work. The remaining, larger section of the work seems to capture some of the desperation, failures and tribulations of the aspirants. Dismembered pieces of furniture - a table leg here, a section of headboard there - bolted on to the 10 x 12 feet work evoke the disarray of waiting rooms, an obstacle course that those trying to funnel up to the higher echelons, the better lifestyle, must navigate.

Aspirants (2024), at Travancore Palace

Gupta has been called artist activist for a reason. Ask him who inspired his activism, and he credits his mother and his school, Patha Bhavan in Kolkata. "My mother, just on her own, she would go and look after aged people in the neighborhood and help them out; to feed them, to clean them, and so on. And then I went to a school where... apart from what we were studying... geography, history, English, Bengali and so on... there was a constant effort to sensitize us towards the environment. And then during the Bangladesh war, we had to take out a procession and make placards, do a lot of drawings and paintings for the placards, which was an exciting job. I was into it. For this procession, the target was to get relief: people donating money, people donating clothes, people donating different kinds of things. This was a collection which would be sent to the relief camps in Bangladesh."

Separated by a Forest (2017-18)

Making placards during the 1971 war turned out to be an important juncture for Gupta for another reason. Around this time, he says, he started adapting certain images that were being published in the newspapers. "I was really charged up at that time... looking at people, what they are going through, thinking of them, thinking of how we can help... From thereon... from the Syrian crisis to Palestine to Black Lives Matter... all these areas suck me in instantly... I was also studying the disappearances of reporters and journalists... I don't look at the happier side of society, to be very honest. I mean these are things which attract me much more than anything else, and I get thick into it. There is a lot of research involved also, to work on them (the artworks)."

You can see some of these thoughts, ideas, research swirling in his works today as well (the oldest work in this exhibition dates back to 2017-18). Consider 'Archive/Museum is a Big Scale Still Life', about the "2013 Muzaffarnagar riots and similar attacks on minorities". A life-size fibreglass "wall" seems to be on fire as instruments of torture (an industrial vice), daily living and memory (a mat, chest of drawers, memorabilia like photos) are foregrounded in the 108 x 48 x 48 inches multimedia work. There's human hair hanging over the wall - a reminder of how women are victimized, brutalized in any riot. The photos depict people at a wedding, in the market, at work, at transit stations... going about their lives, not anticipating the violence.

Archive/Museum is a Big Scale Still Life

What you see, when you see it

Gupta says he thought long and hard about the placement of the artworks in 'Migrants in the Museum'. Take 'In Memory', for instance. Gupta thought about how to place the work so that there would be just enough room to go around back while still hiding away the wooden pillar and door. "The archaic typewriter is cut into three. There's a kind of violence in that also."

Similarly, for the next work in the exhibition, 'Frozen in Time', Gupta devoted the entire anteroom to it. "This is the fourth time I am showing this work, and this placement is the best so far. It's not too big a place, and it's isolated," he says.

'Frozen in Time' was originally created for the 2018 Kochi Biennale. To make it, Gupta created moulds of the feet of 20 working-class women who had migrated to India as infants and toddlers in 1947. "Now they are in their 70s and they have spent almost their entire lives like slaves; like they've been stagnated in cruel time," he says.

Gupta was originally drawn to the women by their singing. For two or three days before he started working on 'Frozen in Time', he went just to listen. "They were singing in Bengali, which is my language, so I could understand."

As he made the moulds of their feet, the women - sitting on chairs in his makeshift workshop - sang the songs they sing while working. Later, as Gupta built up the sculpture, he found himself redeploying the moulds to make more and more feet, and stacking them on top of each other, till the sculpture was as tall as an average woman on the subcontinent.

Gupta says that he did not know from the start that the saddle would come on top of the stacked feet. But as the sculpture rose to about the average Indian woman's height, he thought about the structures that oppress and overwork them. The saddle came to mind as a physical reminder of reining in and controlling, of hierarchy, and also because it drives home the point about exploiting and treating humans like animals. A comment on how these workers were put to slavish work; extra labour squeezed out of them at every opportunity to make their rich masters richer still.

Frozen in Time by Probir Gupta, at the Travancore Palace gallery in New Delhi. Don't miss the working-class women's toes stacked to form this sculpture.

Indeed, the themes of class and caste oppression, hierarchies, race, exploitation, deprivation recur and reverberate in Gupta's works, which feted art critic Geeta Kapur has called "modernist assemblages exploding in our face" in the exhibition catalogue that released on February 11.

Consider his 2024 work 'The Bahujan Syndicate'. The 98 x 168 inches digital print-acrylic-oxides-on-canvas work registers moments of oppression and mounts subversions to it. As with his other works, it offers multiple threads that coalesce into a single narrative of exploitation and the resistance to it. A photograph of a white woman sleeping restfully on the chest of a Black woman, possibly her slave, finds echoes elsewhere on the canvas. Gupta references Edouard Manet's 'Olympia' as well as Done/Daniele Urgo's 2014 work 'Downgrading of Olympia' which shows the Black slave reclining on the bed and the white woman sitting in attendance holding flowers. Sewing machines, borders, the four arms of Goddess Kali pop up in places, as ideas and iconographies, concessions and contradictions. Two metallic medallions depict political party symbols: the elephant of the Bahujan Samaj Party and the elephant of the conservative Republican Party in the US.

Edouard Manet's 'Olympia' as well as Done/Daniele Urgo's 2014 work 'Downgrading of Olympia' find a place in 'The Bahujan Syndicate'.

"The Museum as a site is where I try to mobilize people of different origins and places with similar situations. That's why 'the Bahujan Syndicate'. This joins the East to the West without frontiers," Gupta explains. "There was already an entry of migrants in the museum... in artworks... one being in Van Gogh's 'Potato Eaters'. The second one was Edouard Manet's 'Olympia', where you have this reclining white nude on a bed and you have a black lady holding a bouquet of flowers for her... it was a matter of distaste actually and the first works of art which were very heavily criticized by the press and the journalists."

Gupta himself was once a migrant in Paris, where he lived for over four years, working odd jobs to make ends meet. Once, while working in a butcher's shop, he fainted from hunger. It could have led to a bad accident, but he survived. The people who helped him and nursed him back to health were another migrant family - from DRC (Congo). Perhaps this shared experience lives on as he travels the world, finding more atrocities and horrors to rescue from antipathy and the short memory of the public.

Probir Gupta talking about 'The Bahujan Syndicate' at the Travancore Palace gallery in February 2025.