In this exhibition, Aban stays away from any other medium but oil painting. Why is oil painting chosen to approach her subjects? Does oil convey the proximity Aban seems to be searching for with them? The artist seems to be firmly rooted in the analogue: is her use of oil a reaction to the hyper-medialisation of the events she represents, accessed by most via digital media? Does oil preserve personal feelings that other mediums seem to subtract from the mise-en-scène? Is oil intimate after all? What is more, her practice does not fall within the category of the much written about and performed participatory art (Bishop 2012) that is now both part of a tradition and an ongoing fashionable quasi-normative politics in the art world (a practice that clearly needs to be interrogated at each occurrence). The onlookers are not invited to co-create what lies within the frame because poiesis remains firmly under Aban’s purview and so she is free to re-represent the worlds that are most significant to her in the way she wants. Yet her work is participatory in a different way: it invites onlookers to pay attention to those who have not only taken part in political protests but who have also contributed to the transformation of the political itself. There are often calls for action drawing upon something that has already been performed. Her subjects are mainly drawn from the labouring classes but they are not just seen labouring in agricultural or other fields. As part of a long and multi-vocal set of political tradition(s) in India, they are embedded in fields of protest to claim their rights. As ‘unlikely subjects of politics’ (Ciotti 2017: 4), the figures portrayed by Aban have often gone viral on digital platforms, their voices amplified, in ways that the everyday has often turned into the spectacular.

Aban’s previous show at the Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke serves as prolegomena to the present one and sets the tone for it. In this show, Aban recast the tragic social history of the present through sapient ‘therapies of colour’: once we familiarise ourselves with them, we can delve into the works in the present exhibition in a deeper way. In Luggage, people and a little space (September/October 2020), most of the works predates the ‘long 2020’ while the impossibility of forgetting the very intense period that followed lingers over There is something tremendous about the blue sky (November 2022). In the latter, there isn’t only a pandemic in the background and the terrible second wave that created a massive rupture within Indian society to make the difference. There are also fundamental questions about the life of ‘large minorities’ (think of the Muslim population in India) and other sections of the population such as farmers in the country and the right to protest for one’s existence. What happens to the human condition in these fraught circumstances? What happens across the gender spectrum? What takes place in those spaces of socio-economic, political, and cultural life, that is the rural and the urban, always in an osmotic relation but often standing firmly as ontologically different in our imagination?

In addition to grand protests and slow, long waiting across many sites, Aban also offers us shorter and ‘minor’ time spans. Take for example train journeys: in a much demotic scene (Sleeper train, Jharkhand), passengers are depicted in close proximity with each other, sharing the intimacy of sleep while the loved blue colour wraps together clothes, the carriage and the sky outside. As it is the case of her several portraits of the Delhi borders, here Aban places attention on togetherness, on the clothes used by women and men to fend themselves from cold nights and days, and human warmth. Ultimately, her focus in this exhibition is on collectives rather than individuals. One wonders whether individuals have a space in her artistic imagination, or they can only exist when seen through these collective acts of resistance? This togetherness can also be seen in the brighter landscapes featuring agricultural fields. However, for some reason, Aban’s palette exudes darkness even when she employs brilliant colours.

Especially since the 1990s, many artistic interventions in India have documented and produced commentaries on urban transformation as well as remaking cities through a plurality of mediums: when artists exit cities, it is most always to chart how the urban’s pervasive power has gone to affect environments, taken over them, or suffocate them with high-rise apartment buildings. In Aban’s work, the rural holds its own dignity, it is firmly tied to the ground by a strange force of gravity that leaves no room for the aggressive metropolitan. In the harvest scenes one notes the recalcitrance of the agricultural worker and a land that does not cease to be important. To those who know and care, there will be reminders of poor wages, footloose migrant workers, landlessness, and farmers’ suicides. Agricultural fields are simply not a happy place to be. A work on the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) (MKSS Yatra, Rajasthan) speaks of those who still want to fight, with much to lose. In this work, women belonging to this organisation are seen mobilising villagers so that they cast their vote in local elections. A puppet placed on a truck towering over the scene is used as a device to spread the message about the importance of democracy and voting. Some women in this painting hold documents obtained through the Right to Information (RTI) Act which citizens can avail themselves also to claim their wages. Still, these papers appear as frail legal records in inhospitable spaces.

The search for the dignity of life, labour and protest pervades Aban’s work: a painting in the exhibition, Delhi Road (2022) says it all. Here, she strips the scene of the human figure. Delhi Road is an elegiac portrait of what remains after the euphoria around a marriage or a similar celebration has passed, the resounding emptiness after the labour has been performed, and the matter which remains after the show is over. The scene looks orderly and shambolic at the same time. Too many times, one has encountered workers returning home after their night shifts, or exhausted by the roadside, lying as discarded objects as much as those festive parasols which can be seen scattered on the ground in this painting. The marriage economy does not spare animals either. The lone white horse adorned for the ceremony appears as guarding those tools. For those who know the city of Delhi, this desolation of labour and sleep—one might well imagine the workers lying down on the footpath nearby—is staged along the interminable (ring) roads often bordering a nature that is impossible to contain, from organised parks to disorganised green. The typical curb stripes signal streets that are homes to many. I cannot stop thinking of the widespread contempt vis-à-vis the poor—the domestic labouring classes among many—whose basic needs are contingent on the slightest change within a large informal economy. Their lives embody a paradox: they do not matter but they are indispensable at the same time.

There is something tremendous about the blue sky almost feels like a gallery of intractable issues: it would be hard to envision a common table with representatives of the political, the corporate, the religious to discuss them—although Stengers (2005) would suggest us to do so in her cosmopolitical proposal. One needs to insurge to be heard. The result is bittersweet: there are some grand victories (the farmers’ movement, this time around) though most labourers’ everyday lives have possibly remained unchanged. The portrait of construction workers on Rajpath (Rajpath, Delhi) suggests an even greater paradox. And we can already imagine their makeshift dwellings next to the infrastructure or building they are working on. These portable lives and hearths can be spotted next to any construction site all over the country. Yet, Aban does not submit to the catastrophic pulses of these times and remains hopeful. When thinking of There is something tremendous about the blue sky, blue as a ‘Bahujan colour’ comes to mind. Bahujan, I will argue, is a hopeful construct, an aspiration, a horizon of possibilities and coexistence with many internal fault-lines.