Drawing Room: What B Pradhan sees in Nandan Ghiya’s installations
There is beauty in shining newness. Creating something from scratch calls for imagination and finesse. But what of the ability to reimagine what already exists? Artists that work with found objects have often drawn new meaning from familiar things: Marcel Duchamp’s urinal/Fountain; Vivan Sundaram’s Black Gold, created with archaeological discards. In the work of Nandan Ghiya, “lost”, “found”, “repurpose” and “familiar” acquire unexpected meanings.
The Jaipur-based artist works with photography-related archival material, inspired by his grandfather’s work as a studio photographer. So, the works and the images they showcase comment on the cost of labour, displacement and transformation. One installation, Babaji’s Haveli (Is it your history as much as mine), is a decoupage of acrylic and putty, found photographs and old advertisements. They’re mounted on found wooden frames and strung together to make a cobbled-together collage. The visuals in the frames are deliberately odd: One features a gentleman posing at leisure, another depicts priests performing religious ceremonies, there are landscapes and buildings which have no connection to each other.
None of this was made from scratch, but Ghiya’s way of bringing them together makes the work greater than the sum of its parts. The muted, desaturated colours evoking a sense of time paused. Found objects carry imprints of labour and touch. Photographic elements, particularly, record something that once lived, while the objects carry the weight of hands that used them. I value the tenderness with which he treats these remnants. They are not relics, but active witnesses to the toils of history.
His other installation, Manthan, reimagines the mythological churning of the ocean by the gods to access the elixir of immortality. In his version, it’s a tower resting on a sprawling, snake-like base (a nod to the thousand-headed snake Vasuki). The entire structure is made with found objects and detritus, almost like Lego blocks assembled on a whim. But view it keeping in mind man’s hunger for ocean-mining, and our exploitation of natural resources, and Manthan becomes a metaphor for the fight for power and control.
The restraint in Ghiya’s installations leads me down interesting trains of thought. What survives when landscapes change? What do objects remember when people forget? How do we preserve the quiet labour that shapes us?
In a world moving toward digital erasure, these archives become critical. They remind us that memory is tactile. Objects rust, photographs fade, but the act of archiving transforms them into witnesses of their time. And through it all, Ghiya’s recent works invite viewers to consider the effect of digital technology on indigenous identities and heritage spaces. The new works introduce deliberate pixellated glitches. Creating a new archive of the present, while still honouring what once was.
Artist bio: Odisha-based B Pradhan’s works honour agrarian histories, the effects of migration and the intimacies of rural life. He uses found materials, field observation and sculptural arrangements.
From HT Brunch, December 13, 2025
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