Ranjan Kaul's art documents society's hidden scars at 'Within, Without: Tales of Evanescence'

A disappearance isn’t just about the vanishing of a body. It erases the name, the story, and, in fact, the very existence of the person they were in society till the moment of disappearance. Delhi artist Ranjan Kaul’s ongoing exhibition ‘Within, Without: Tales of Evanescence’ (sixth edition), at Okhla’s Urban Fringe, brings together his oeuvre, grappling with stories of child abduction, sexual assault, the exploitation of sex workers, migration, and the hidden scars of life.

All you need to know about the ongoing art exhibition Within, Without: Tales of Evanescence

The show, inaugurated on September 19 at Bikaner House, features over 30 figurative paintings, woodcuts, sculptures, and collages, created since his last exhibition in 2024. “When I visited his studio, I could see he was a man on a mission,” says Ina Puri, curatorial advisor of the show. “These weren’t random images. It's the story of a human being.”

Kaul, an engineer by training and editor at Oxford University Press, turned to painting full-time in 2017. A large part of his work revolves around sex workers, missing women, and those forced into silence. They are drawn partly from newspaper cuttings and social media notifications, and partly from his own imagination.

In his mixed-media work ‘Lost Girl’, Kaul collages cuttings from newspaper ads of missing young girls and women, layering them over the painted image of a smiling girl. The girl’s face is gradually consumed by the clippings—a stark reminder of how silence engulfs the missing. In another, he paints a forsaken woman crouched low by the road, the words “missing,” “talash,” and “lapata” scrawled across her figure. “Every day you see these ads in the newspapers. Who are these people? Why is nobody writing or talking about them?” asks Kaul. 

Motifs of power

Animals are recurring motifs through Kaul’s work, like the chameleons in ‘A New Identity’. Elsewhere a rooster symbolises the patriarchal order and power. In the ‘Ruling the Roost’ series, a man is shown forcefully carrying a woman aloft. “It isn’t just about one man’s lust. It is society, the community, that abducts and exploits women,” he explains. While, pigs take centre stage in a woodcut titled ‘Equus Siege I’, referencing the chilling “pig butchering” scams of cybercrime, where victims are groomed through fake romances and then financially gutted. Figures sit before computer screens while a pig dominates the canvas. 

For Kaul, such modern predations are also tied to the broader theme of disappearance. Victims of cybercrime vanish too—sometimes financially, sometimes emotionally, sometimes physically into trafficking routes stretching across the globe.  

Intersecting lives

Kaul’s compositions resemble collage-like layers—one corner may hold a portrait, another a symbolic object. Multiple scenes fold into one frame, compressing time and narrative. “I’m limited by the two-dimensional canvas, but I try to create longitudinal narratives,” Kaul explains. “Indian art has done this for centuries—look at depictions of Krishna, where you see him as a child, a lover, a warrior, all in one image. I’m borrowing from that to suggest simultaneity.”

In ‘Booted Out’, which recalls mass migration and deportation in North America, Kaul saturates the canvas with swampy greens. Figures drag themselves across the terrain, slog through mud, or row across in a makeshift boat: a woman trapped behind a grill, a pale-skinned man with yellow hair kicking another into the water from a bridge that centers the portrait. 

His works pull viewers into a maze of interconnected episodes, forcing them to navigate between what is shown and what is suggested. “The audience must bring their own sensibilities, their own experiences, to interpret the work,” says Kaul. 

In ‘Turbulent Terrain’’, Kaul turns his eye closer home to the violence in India’s Northeast. The canvas brims with flowers, gardens, green hills, and dancers performing Mizoram’s Cheraw dance. But in the corner, thatched huts burn, and a pair of bare feet—a corpse—grounds the scene in violence.

Bearing witness

The weight of these stories—some personal, some collective—could easily crush an artist. But Kaul says painting these stories becomes catharsis: “I haven’t lived these situations, but by putting myself through the emotions on canvas, it becomes an outlet; otherwise, you’re keeping everything bottled up.” 

As an artist, he explains that being remembered through art is also a form of justice. “I'm trying to document what is going around, the everyday news, the overall environment, and what happened. So, if people remember anything, they will remember through pictures.”

On view at Urban Fringe, F 15 Basement, Pocket F, Okhla Phase 1, until October 5, from 11 am onwards

This article is written by Adithi Reena Ajith