Working class heroes: Architect Martand Khosla recreates the world of Delhi’s labour
Martand Khosla’s first work of art found an unlikely canvas, but one that gave him a wide viewership: the cover of last year’s critically acclaimed book A Free Man by journalist Aman Sethi. Khosla, who is an architect by training, made the frontal portrait of the man – a worker at one of the buildings 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 the issues I deal with as an architect. 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 over the years.” Khosla’s architectural 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 constant interplay between the macro and micro, the individual and the built forms in the city. “One of the recurring ideas in my work has been the idea of transformation: 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 subsequent 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 of that 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 residential 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 relationship between the state and displaced 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 relationship between the disenfranchised worker-citizen and the state. Made from digitally reworked photographs of workers 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 interpret jurisprudence and the urban poor, using the text of the landmark 1986 Olga Tellis judgment, which linked the the right to housing and livelihood with the constitutional right to life. “In the ’80s, you have these judgments that talk about the responsibilities of the government towards migrants in the cities. Post-liberalisation 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 text from the Tellis judgment hints at the gap between legal justice and reality. Khosla also wove handbags using paper strips of the judgment text, with tools of a painter, carpenter and plumber in them, evoking the common image of workers squatting with their tools each morning and waiting for people to hire them, in labour chowks across Delhi... Read more:
