Odisha artist Paribartana Mohanty captures the remnants of bulldozer-raj on the Kathputli Colony

How can painting, long trapped in hierarchies of objecthood and commodity, hold ruins, dust, absence, and yet insist on the living? Paribartana Mohanty’s latest exhibition, 'I Rescued Speed Altogether', on view at Shrine Empire, brings together 12 large paintings and three moving-image pieces that explore demolition, displacement and the rapid transformation of Delhi’s urban landscape. Central to the exhibition is the demolition of Kathputli Colony, once a settlement of puppeteers, magicians, dancers and musicians, razed in 2017 under Delhi’s first in-situ rehabilitation project. Earlier this year, the multistorey high-rise built for the rehabilitation of Kathputli’s residents was renamed Pragati Apartments—from Phoenix—a hollow title without any record of the just and equitable habitat promised nearly a decade ago.

Artist Paribartana Mohanty’s latest exhibition is on in Delhi

Kathputli Colony, as cultural theorist Santosh Sadanandan reminds us in the essay accompanying the exhibition, “was not just an eviction, but a symbolic burial of nomadic time, a time that could not be surveyed, taxed, or neatly aestheticised”.

Dismantling of memory

Born in Odisha and based in Delhi, Paribartana Mohanty’s practice spans new media, video, performance lectures and painting. Currently Visiting Faculty at Shiv Nadar University, he describes his work as driven by the “desire to remain with the dust and the ruin, maybe to register what remains ungrievable.” His single-channel video loops were first staged in informal settlements across the city. In the aftermath of the 2019 Supreme Court verdict on the Babri Masjid demolition, Mohanty re-edited his earlier performances, staging them against the absurdity of cycles of erasure across the country, whether of religious sites, modernist heritage or urban settlements. As Sadanandan writes, “these mark a dismantling of memory itself, of layered solidarities, architectural testimony, and everyday internationalism.”

For Mohanty, painting Kathputli is to grapple with this “epistemic rupture”, where ruins, fragments, shadows and debris bear witness to displaced lives and “a monocular narrative of complex histories”.

In 'Shadows', the outline of a razed tree stretches across a mosque, moments before the mosque itself was demolished. 'Field' recalls a vanished cricket ground, while 'Surface and Pit' open into blackened centres, their voids magnetic. Pipes, bricks, and residues of infrastructure create a noise on the canvas in magical fashion.

Points, not full stops

For the artist, this is not a nostalgic project, nor one seeped in stereotypical guilt often associated with discourse on India’s urban poor. It is a slow, steady act of reconstruction. “It is just not a piece of information to immediately jump into. Art needs time,” asserts Mohanty. Refusing the idea of the painter as an expressive self, the choice of his tool and gesture is significant: “I started by using a palette knife, that to me, is very similar to a mason’s trowel (karni). To use the spatula-like knife on canvas resembled a process of construction used by a mason, rebuilding brick by brick, stroke by stroke, towards representing the unrepresentable,” he explains.

Over the eight years of making this series, his process shifted towards pointillism. What art history has often read as a technique of light and optics becomes, for him, a forensic method. Here, each mark is like a dust particle, fading as it witnesses dismembered landscapes, each time altered by season and destruction. In the process, Impressionism’s shifting optics are repurposed, as points gather dynamically, demanding the viewer’s attention and forcing vision to assemble fragments into living memory.

Resist forgetting

Against the spectacular temporality of bulldozer raj, where demolitions are staged as “instant justice” or “national spectacle”, Mohanty’s works propose another tempo. They return us to an alternate perception and the renewed labour of seeing. “Through painting and performing, I dwell and I resist. My ruins, my dust, and my cracks call for a collective political presence,” Mohanty writes.

The exhibition’s title, borrowed from the artist’s young son Timeme, captures this paradox of slowness and speed. To rescue speed is a method of persistence in the aftermath instead of incessant acceleration. From the Hall of Nations to Kathputli Colony, Mohanty’s practice has moved across sites, searching for the aesthetic and ethical forms adequate to their ruins. 'I Rescued Speed Altogether' might seem another instance of artistic attempt at reclaiming the archive, but it demands that history be understood as “present continuous”, happening all around, by inhabiting ruins as sites of endurance and solidarity.

In the basement of Shrine Empire, the canvases lean against the wall, resting on objects from the artist’s studio—stools, toys, books—rather than being hung as distant commodities. This unsettled installation keeps alive a temporality that is precarious, spectral but insistently present. Against the state’s ritual of forgetting, the works insist that demolition is not the final word. The future is unfolding, displacement is at play, struggling for visibility amid flux.

(Attend the walkthrough at Shrine Empire, D-395 Defence Colony, led by Kathputli Colony artists and residents Puran Bhatt and Santosh Bhatt, along with Rajeev Sethi and Paribartana Mohanty today, 4-5pm)

This article is written by Prachi Satrawal