Anupam Roy

…ing: Scenaries without Sovereignty

Project 88

Ground Floor, BMP Building, N.A. Sawant Marg
Colaba, Mumbai – 400 005

Review by Vittoria Martinotti

Anupam Roy, …ing_03, 2023-2025. Oil on canvas. 96 x 72 in. Photography by Anil Rane. Courtesy of the artist and Project88, Mumbai.

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.

Anupam Roy, …ing_06, 2023-2025. Oil, sand, mud, cement, distemper, adhesive, acrylic, and enamel on canvas. 96 x 60 in. Photography by Anil Rane. Courtesy of the artist and Project88, Mumbai.

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.

Anupam Roy, …ing_08, 2023-2025. Oil on canvas. 72 x 48 in. Photography by Anil Rane. Courtesy of the artist and Project88, Mumbai.

There’s humour too, the kind born of despair. Characters like Post-Tooth, a gorilla-like anarcho-mascot , holding a broken wrench like a club, feel ripped from a dystopian graphic novel, or the ancestor of one if the Italian brainrot figures,  the margins of a prisoner’s sketchbook. Roy’s zines and prints channel a kind of punk anthropology, part field note, part scream. Think Kafka inked by Ralph Steadman in the middle of a riot.

This is an artist who knows his rage is not singular. The pieces throb with collectivism, made with and among others, they resist authorship as much as they resist finality. The monstruous here is not a distortion of reality, it is reality, once the polish is stripped.

You leave the show not with answers but with noise in your ears, a feral echo of something repressed for too long. It’s not clean, it’s not resolved and it doesn’t want to be. Because what we’re witnessing isn’t a conclusion, it’s an uprising in progress. An exhibition that doesn’t linger in a cold white cube space, and thank god for that.

Anupam Roy, “…ing: Sceneries without Sovereignty”. Exhibition view at Project88, Mumbai, 2025. Photography by Anil Rane. Courtesy of the artist and Project88, Mumbai.