Working class heroes Architect Martand Khosla recreates the world of Delhi's labour in his first solo exhibition, findsSonam Joshi. artand Khosla's first work of art found an unlikely can vas, but one that gave him a wide viewership: the cover of last year's critically acclaimed book A Free Man by journalistAman Sethi. Khosla , who is an architect by train ing, made the frontal portrait ofthe man - a worker at oneofthe build ings he had designed - in 2009, with rubber stamps: symbols of state authority that are inextricably linked to the lives of workers. The image led to a wider series , which together with a larger body of work from the last three years, makes an appearance in City of Hope- his first solo exhibition. "I felt very compelled to look at
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the issues I deal with as an archi tect. I get to look at the macro scale - master plans and how the urban organism is growing, stretching and expanding outwards," Khosla told Time Out. "At the same time, I've always had a relationship with the people who are actually building the buildings that I have designed overthe years." Khosla 's archi tectural practice and interactions with workers inform his vocabulary as an artist. In the exhibition, the material composition of each work is inseparably linked to a critique of urban planning, and there is a con stant interplay between the macro and micro, the individual and the builtforms in the city. "One
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of the recurring ideas in my work has been the idea oftransforma tion: its inherently fragile nature and its repetitive condition," he said. "I am trying to confront the idea of hope, tied to the urban condition and its inevitable subse quent hopelessness." Khosla became interested in the social infrastructure within cities soon after earning his master's in the UK in 2001, but it was a series of incidents that led to the creation ofthat first portrait. First, there was the overnight disappearance of a slum near a HIV and TB hospice he was designing at GB Road , then conversations with a site worker who had been evicted from a slum and was trying to prove his residen tial claim to resettlement, and then a 2010 newspaper report about seven slum fires in Delhi in a single week. "You wonder what direction we 're taking as cities," he said . "I wanted to understand the rela tionship between the state and dis placed citizens from a social, legal and political point of view." Early works, such as the rubber stamp portrait series "Without Any Title", engaged with the relation ship between the disenfranchised worker-citizen and the state. Made from digitally reworked photographs of work ers at construction sites, these shadowy, passport-photograph like images capture men and women whose identity is defined by the rubber stamps that render them visible. Another set of early installations interpretjurispru dence and the urban poor, using the text of the landmark 1986 Olga Tellisjudgment, which linked the the right to housing and livelihood with the constitutional right to life. "In the '80s, you have thesejudg ments that talk about the responsi bilities of the government towards migrants in the cities. Post-liber alisation you see a very different language," Khosla said. The installations also look at the wider world of unorganised urban labour. For instance, a broken cart laden with paper fruit covered with textfrom the Tellisjudgment hints atthe gap between legal justice and reality. Khosla also wove hand bags using paper strips of the judg ment text, with tools of a painter, carpenter and plumber in them, evoking the common image of workers squatting with theirtools each morning and waiting for peo ple to hire them , in labour chowks
across Delhi. A series of later sculptures evoke construction sites by using brick dust in several ways. "Sketch es for Adam", another series of worker-portraits, was made by glu ing individual paper parts, spraying brick dust on them, and then past ing them together. An L-shaped diptych uses brick dust to create a miniature model of a rural land scape at one end and a clustered slum dwelling on the other, sug gesting the transitional process of migration, or the coexistence ofthe two habitats. Khosla takes a more abstractturn in another triptych, which comprises three squares with different textures of brick dust placed together, suggestive of parched earth or a pile of bricks on a roadside. "If you go to a site, peo ple are covered in the construction material. Brick is an object of crea tion but brick dust is also an object of destruction," Khosla said. Two installations made with brick dust and transparent boxes con veythe playofscale most vividly. The first ofthese is a ten foot-high house, whose form will be simulta neously fragmented and created using transparent plastic boxes lined with brick dust. The second is "In the Other Room", a twopart series in which miniature brick-dust artifacts are placed inside small boxes: a fan hanging from a ceil ing, a pair of slippers, a cooking pan on a stove, a solitary ladder or spade. "I have used the building site as an important location, as a transforming and transformative space," Khosla said. "Construction workers are always in a moment oftransition, there is a sense of a beginning but before the end arrives, you are transported into another beginning." Although the actual exhibition will be divided between two venues because of Khosla's desire to engage with students from Jawa haria I Nehru University, the works in City of Hope manage to both criti cally appraise the lopsided nature of the frenzied construction in our cities in recent years, as well as put a face to the working lives that are integral to it.
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Construction workers are always in a
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City of Hope is ongoing at Seven Art and City of Hope U is at Jawaharlal Nehru University from Sat Oct 27. See Exhibitions.