Curatorial Note

“All trees and flowering plants stand on their own…” draws its title from the poetry of Binoy Majumdar (1934–2006), a literary figure from North 24 Parganas, West Bengal. The verses continue: 

“grounds at a distance forever

dreaming of breathtaking union”

For Anupam Roy, these phrases recall not just the partition of Bengal in the moment of Independence from colonial rule in the subcontinent into two fragments with it’s own conflicted destinies—as they were cast into the imagination of modern nation states—but also ongoing land rights movements in and around West Bengal and Chhattisgarh.

Majumdar’s poems, which often read as if they are journal entries, frequently reference local botanicals through their overlapping condition with the lives of the people in the Bengal region. This conflation of human and more than human entities opens up possibilities to counter conventional, hegemonic landscape paintings from the Bengal School of Art that romanticize and idealize continuous, unbroken stretches of pastoral and forested land, and their indigenous inhabitants. In the series of drawings, posters, zines and photo-notes on view, the artist uses the discontinuous, rhythmic, delicate line to stage partial yet affective encounters with the continuous disintegration of all that the land encompasses, including itself. By doing so, he averts the gaze of the viewers of his works from that of surveyors who claim ownership of these lands to that of its inhabitants who are immersed in the struggles embodied by the landscape and resist such totalizing approaches that mark the desire for power and control. 

The temporal and spatial distortions offered by Anupam’s response to landscape painting become assertions to the impossibility of representing ongoing everyday violence subjected upon land and life that stands apart from majoritarian, privileged records and political sensibilities which plague the Indian context. From an artistic practice that locates itself at the confluence of culture and resistance, is informed by grassroot mobilizations, and often presents as political propaganda in protest sites, this body of work emerge as more poetic contemplations of invisibilized experiences that foreground local and rural land-labour relations, and the circulations between canonical representations in Indian art history, power, and territorial control.

Our sincere gratitude to Gobinda Paul, Subham Acharya, Tushar Kanti Saha, Birbhum Jomi, Jibon Jibika o Prokriti Bachao Mahasabha, Panjeri Artists' Union, Gaurav Chauhan, Preksha Kothari, Ashok Kanti, Girish Chandra Pathak, without whom this project would not have been possible.

About the Artist

Anupam Roy

Anupam Roy’s artistic practice is rooted in sustained engagement with the Indian hinterland, critically addressing themes of ecological destruction, labour rights, and dystopian regimes. His research explores political questions of land, ecology, and labour, alongside the aesthetic inquiries of representing violence and marginalized communities, at present through movements against the Deucha Pachami Coal Project in Birbhum and the anti-caste movement in West Bengal. Central to his work are two concepts he developed: 'land guards,' referencing grassroots efforts to protect land and resources, and 'representational impossibilities,' addressing the limitations of language in capturing the extremities of pain and exclusion. 

Anupam is a visual artist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Media, and Performance at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence (SNIOE). His works have been featured in prominent exhibitions and festivals, including the 2024 edition of Colomboscope Interdisciplinary Arts Festival in Sri Lanka, the 2023 Serendipity Arts Festival with Panjeri Artists' Union, the 2018 New Museum Triennial in New York, and the Frieze Art Fair in London. He has also exhibited at prominent spaces such as Project 88, Mumbai, and Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi. He is a recipient of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) Emerging Artist Award (2018), the Charles Wallace India Trust long-term scholarship (2020) and has participated in international forums, including seminars and workshops at SOAS, London, Bordeaux Montaigne University, and IIT Gandhinagar.