If you walk into Anupam Roy’s “…ing: Sceneries without Sovereignty” expecting quiet contemplation, turn around. This is not a show that whispers, it screams, scratches, and claws its way under your skin. It doesn’t soothe, it scrapes, and that’s the point.
The grotesque is not a gimmick here, it’s the language. Roy’s work unravels in an aesthetic of rage: jagged brushstrokes, monstrous bodies, twisted limbs, slogans that punch instead of speak. This isn’t rebellion packaged for a gallery opening. It’s raw, unfiltered, and politically volatile, a terrain where propaganda is a weapon, not a genre.
Across drawing, sculpture, print, zine, and video, Roy assembles a scattered chorus of the dispossessed: eco-oppressed bodies tangled in root systems, skeletons marching in bureaucratic drag, slogans like “EAT THE RICH” or “REBELLION IS GROTESQUE” screaming across textures that feel closer to protest banners than canvas. The materials bleed urgency. This is less exhibition, more field report from the edge of a collapsing world order, from a dying old planet that lacks the footing for its rebirth.
And yet there is structure in the noise. The title “…ing” suggests the continuous, the unfinished, a grammar of resistance. Roy doesn’t deal in aftermaths, his practice lives in the throes of things, of grief, of uprooting, of revolt. Sovereignty here isn’t a right but a phantom, as the artist points out, the land doesn’t belong to anyone, we belong to it. But what happens when that land is taken, sold, strip-mined, renamed?
Violence, in Roy’s lexicon, is not spectacle, it’s structure. “Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed,” reads one of the quote’s published in his book “Weaving Labyrinths” (2020.) “They themselves are the result of violence.” These works don’t ask for your empathy, they dare you to admit complicity. A distorted foot sinks into soil, rats swarm at its base, veins become roots. Colonialism never left, it just changed costume, and Roy, like a visual exorcist, is here to tear the mask off.
