On the art of Anupam Roy
As Anupam Roy writes, we “refuse” both the "picturesque" and the “horizon as a promise of dominion,” as we manifest the “fracture,” the “broken story,” the memory of land “against its theft.”
This describes much of what captured my imagination when I first saw Anupam’s work during the 2018 New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage, in New York City. The refusal of the broken, of the fragmented, to simply remain broken. This was not a denial of the break, but a rebellion against the breaking. A re-constitution of partially lost collectives, potentially universalising. But not flattening archetypes. A rejection of both utilitarianism and false transcendence.
The white cube exhibition space tends to decontextualize the art objects placed within it — as Danica Radoshevich argues in her essay, “Zombie Gallery: The German Ideology and the White Cube” (Red Wedge Magazine, 2015). In this way the gallery recapitulates capitalist ideology. Some of my comrades and I had argued that if we approached the white cube as a theatrical space, after Alain Badiou (Rhapsody for the Theatre, 2013), and Bertolt Brecht (“A Short Organum for the Theatre,” 1949), we could potentially reassert the proletarian and subaltern.
Anupam brought the proletarian and subaltern into Songs for Sabotage not as abstractions or a subject of interest, but in full bodily chaos. This confused some New York City art critics — even the ostensibly Marxist. Many in the art world have come to see art as mere objects, rather than records of subjective human performance and experience. From this perspective, art may be attached to politics and people, but it isn’t necessarily political or human in and of itself.
I fell in love with Anupam’s work.
At the New Museum, by his Stateless Militia series, Roy placed the famous quote from Antonio Gramsci, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.” As my closest comrades were trying to fend off the metastasizing revanchism represented by Donald Trump in the United States (US), and knowing a little about the recent history of India, I immediately identified with the Gramsci quote. I was seeing “morbid symptoms” everywhere. As food pantries ran out of food, as “democratic norms” unravelled, as Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists disappeared in suspicious circumstances.
The art critic, Ben Davis, seemed somewhat nonplussed by Roy’s inclusion of Gramsci, writing, “I know, more or less, what Gramsci meant by his ‘crisis,’ situated as he was against the background of an ascendant Italian fascism. I don’t know what Roy means here, not specifically.” (“How the New Museum’s Triennial Sabotages Its Own Revolutionary Mission,” ArtNet, 2018).
Recent Indian history — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s ascension to power in 2014, the BJP and Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat Massacre, and left, working-class, and subaltern resistance — would seem to provide some clues as to what Roy meant. But Davis joked about political affiliations, “do you, as a viewer, feel familiar enough with India’s tangle of Maoist political organizations to understand what an allegiance to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation possibly indicates?”
I often like Davis’s writing. I favorably reviewed his first book, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (2013), and found his book Art in the After-Culture (2022) insightful. But I thought it odd that Davis didn’t see it as part of his job to explain what Roy’s political affiliations might mean to his readers — if their confusion was so centrally at issue (which is yet another question). Regardless, one only need visit a working-class neighborhood within the US to know what might be meant by "morbid symptoms” — see, for example, the poison water in Flint, Michigan.
That is not to say injustice and privation alone cause “morbid symptoms.” As Anupam notes, it is the failure of individual and collective resistance that causes “morbid symptoms" to appear. Many people and landscapes are broken. In the East Palestine (US) train derailment toxic chemicals were spread across a working-class town outside Pittsburgh. Pipelines are bulldozed through the lands of indigenous people. Masked agents of the state kidnap our neighbors and deport them to concentration camps. But, it is our inability to cohere resistance, on a great enough scale, to mend together our social brokenness, that allows morbidity to fester.
Resistance and Imagination
There has been resistance. As Sandip K. Luis writes in “The Great Indian Hyperfascism” (Field, 2025), just in India’s National Capital Region surrounding Delhi, there have been protests targeting the University Grants Committee, the Rohith Vemula Movement, resistance to the Citizen Amendment Act, the farmers’ movement, and more.
In the US, the BLM movement culminated in mass rebellions in 2020. There has been substantial growth of socialist organization, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, new labor organizing, and a mushrooming of queer mutual aid in response to draconian anti-trans laws. Thousands of student activists — many queer, Jewish, Muslim, and Arab — risked their educations (and more) to oppose Israel’s genocide.
But the social movements of the US didn’t present a political alternative in the 2024 elections, allowing an authoritarian and increasingly fascistic new Trumpism to resume executive rule.
As Sandip K. Luis observes of Indian art world complicity with “hyperfascism,” the US art world is also increasingly complicit, or passive, in the face of America’s domestic reaction. Luis describes an historic lack of an oppositional avant-garde in Indian art, as well as the kindling of a militancy among a new generation of artists. The US used to have an oppositional artistic avant-garde — albeit not quite so radical as its European and Latin American cousins — but it became institutionalized and “weak,” tailing the right-ward drift of the political center.
The oppositional artistic practices Luis outlines could be a lesson to artists in the US. By turning to the exploited and oppressed art can regain an élan vital. And, in doing so, artists can play a role in fighting the limits on imagination that enable a faltering neoliberal “realism” as well as fascist regression.
Anupam’s art helps begin that work by bringing “an uprising in progress” (Victoria Martinotti, “I am not NON Violent. Anupam Roy at Project 88,” Daily Lazy, 2025), into the white cube, and bringing that imagination out of the gallery into “real life,” creating a feedback loop of “ameliorative promise” (Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, 2012).
Broken Landscapes
In Anupam Roy’s Seventh Broken Story: Sloshing Time, Jessore Road, the artist pivots back and forth in time, from past to present traumas, situated in the particular historical landscape along the road connecting Jessore and Kolkata.
That road is known to some in “the west” through Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “September on Jessore Road,” about the 1971 war. The poem was sympathetic to refugees but arguably othering. Evidently, some accused Ginsberg of writing it to impress Bob Dylan. The poem is on display at the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka.
Roy marks Jessore Road as a site of partition violence and ordeals of rekindled majoritarianism. Bengali speaking Indian citizens are called “Bangledeshis.” The dreams of a democratic republic — let alone left aspirations for self-determination and genuine socialism — break and falter.
The landscape of Jessore Road is its own. Its history is its own. But the dynamics at work — that demonize Muslim workers and promote a fictive unity — exist in every imperialist country and former colony. As the US folk-punk musicians Sister Wife Sex Strike put it in their anti-Zionist song, “From the River to the Sea:” “I've stepped in rivers / That bear the wrong name / And now I see the same old tale / Taking a new shape / The places are all different / But the faces are the same.”
The processes of imperialism, colonialism and genocide are both specific and generalizable. The Israeli state renamed the cities of Palestine, just as the colonial-settlers of the US renamed the rivers and mountains of North America. In Palestine, the town of Bayt Jibrin became Beit Gurvin. In the US state of South Dakota, the indigenous Lakota mountain Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe — the Six Grandfathers — was renamed Mount Rushmore. The busts of dead US presidents were later carved into its rock face.
As the ruling-class turned to neoliberalism — and embraced the immiseration of the US working-class — they opened the door to revitalized racist populisms and fascisms. A new left was just beginning to be born in the US when the pandemic took hold and as Trumpism asserted its power. Democracy. Black Liberation. Socialism. Communism. Queer Liberation. Women’s Liberation. Decolonization. A thousand dreams were broken. A thousand dreams need to be sewn back together.
Broken Figures
The social ensemble is called to Anupam Roy’s image of Nangeli in his 2018 drawing from Resistance Land — also included in Songs of Sabotage. The social ensemble is within the figure as well as around it. Each exploited and oppressed subject, as the poet Richard Hamilton observes, has their own “discordant will.” And the collective will of the oppressed and exploited is also discordant. As Roy told me in an interview for Red Wedge Magazine in 2019:
Take for example the Brahmanical imposition on the Dalit community where the women were not supposed to cover their breasts. There is a story about a Dalit woman, Nangeli, who covered her breasts. When the tax collector came she cut off her breast and paid her taxes with it… I believe that the woman, Nangeli, is not an individual woman. She represents an entire history of oppression when she cuts off her breast to pay the tax. It is not about a particular individual. Again, to go back to your first question, about the individual and the collective, it is not just one woman doing that act. It is collective consciousness enabling that act. That’s how the collective and individual merge.
The broken subaltern figure may feel alone but, by definition, cannot be alone. The very nature of the breaking is born of a collective punishment of capitalism, racism, caste bigotry, heterosexism.
The self-determination of individuals, of oppressed nations, of divided laborers, is at the heart of Anupam Roy’s work. The individual figure — and the social whole — may be broken. But this is not a permanent law of being. It is conjuncture.
Healing the Social Ensemble
In Anupam Roy’s May Day (2021), hands holding tools seem to break through the Earth. I know Anupam’s depiction of hands, feet, and other seemingly dismembered body parts are partly a reference to the association of caste roles to different parts of the body — to both the capitalist division of labor and the division of laborers (B.R. Ambedkar).
In Anupam’s aforementioned drawing of Nangeli, whose figure also references the pre-historic sculpture, the Venus (or Woman) of Willendorf, he is not only depicting a specific person, but the “presence of her historical act.” Another figure is cutting off their own head, and “instead of blood, rats are coming out,” pivoting against bigotries about the “caste that ‘eats rats’ — the ‘Musahar.’” Anupam cultivates a counter-image to “superficial Brahmin-upper caste metaphors,” to rally “stateless militias,” to foster a counter-imaginary to capitalist realism (Mark Fisher).
While the fascist side of official life offers bigoted occultism, the “realistic” bourgeoisie — including many of its liberals and social democrats — offer a universe of tautology and tautophrases. Tautophrases are popular colloquialisms that short circuit critical thinking. “It is what it is.” “A win is a win.” “Boys will be boys.” Tautophrases are the everyday equivalent of “being realistic,” of not demanding too much, of sacrificing the interests of the oppressed to (supposedly) slow the entrenchment of fascism and reaction. Or, they conceal apologetics for bigotry and oppression. Too much of our art and politics are tautophrases. The world cries out for counter-images and counter-imaginaries.
I fell in love with Anupam’s work because it isn’t “what it is,” it's something more. Anupam’s work is like slip healing fragments of broken clay.
Bibliography
Alain Badiou, Rhapsody for the Theatre (Verso: 2013)
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, (Verso: 2012)
Ben Davis, “How the New Museum’s Triennial Sabotages Its Own Revolutionary Mission,” ArtNet (2018)
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative (Zero: 2009)
Victoria Martinotti, “I am not NON Violent. Anupam Roy at Project 88,” Daily Lazy (2025)
Danica Radoshovich, “Zombie Gallery: The German Ideology and the White Cube,” Red Wedge Magazine (2015)
Sister Wife Sex Strike, “From the River to the Sea,” From the River to the Sea (2024)
Adam Turl interviews Anupam Roy, “Broken Cogs in the Machine" Red Wedge Magazine (2019)
About the author
Adam Turl is an artist, poet, writer, and editor at Locust Review, who lives in southern Illinois in the United States, and has exhibited work at Project 1612, ArtSpace 304, The Cube, the Brett Wesley Gallery, and Gallery 210. They are a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective (LALC), and organize, with their partner Tish Turl, the evolving visual and conceptual art space and project, the Born Again Labor Museum (BALM). They are the author of Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth (Revol Press, 2025), which has been nominated for an “On the Brinck” book award. In 2016 Turl was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France. They have an MFA in studio arts from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis, and a PhD in media arts from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. They are currently working on an MFA in poetry. Turl is also a member of the Southern Illinois Democratic Socialists of America.