The first encounter of Aban Raza’s new exhibition Nothing Human Is Alien to Me at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke feels almost theatrical, a wall-sized eruption of colour and bodies, a shamiana rendered with the scale and force of a public mural. Raza’s exhibition (on till December 15 ) shared the space with a conversation with the founder members of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, and Shankar Singh on its launch day on November 29.
Raza, a Delhi-based artist, stages protest and pause in the same breath, painting a visual vocabulary of crowds in the eight works on display. “The location could be interchangeable, from Singhu border on the edge of Delhi to Shaheen Bagh to Bhim in Rajasthan, but in every case, the workers’ presence speaks of a churn and an insistent message for change,” writes Gayatri Sinha in the curatorial note.
Known for her uncompromising depictions of contemporary resistance movements, Raza disarms with candour: “Why do I paint this? Because how can you not paint this?”
The politics of waiting
The exhibition pivots between intimate interiors and expansive public gatherings. In the tent painting titled Maruti Suzuki Struggle Committee, IMT Chowk, Manesar Tehsil, Haryana (2024), bundles of blankets, durries and personal objects become memorials of an evicted protest site. A deliberate emphasis is placed on the blankets, sent in solidarity by workers from a nearby blanket factory who themselves could not join the protest. The choice of what to paint, and how, reveals how consciously each element is rendered. For instance, the Palestinian flag or its colours appear across most of her works, a symbol Raza has integrated since 2012 as an assertion of remembering and solidarity.
Waiting is a key motif in Raza’s work. In Bhim Bus Stand (2025), women sit in a row, leaning into uncertainty. “I tried to capture this moment of pause after which you suddenly have to get up and run… you know what you are waiting for but you do not know when it will happen,” says the artist. Adds Aruna Roy: “And inevitably, only a few get on and the rest are left… the frustration of not getting on to the bus is a metaphor for how we have not been able to get on to the democracy bus in other ways.” The painting’s extended floor pushes the viewer into the composition, as if you are sitting with them, waiting.
This active waiting, Raza notes, defines labour movements across decades. “In Bhim Mela, they have been asking for the same demands for 35 to 40 years. In Maruti, every 18 July they gather to demand for their rights. The exhaustion, the tiredness, the waiting, it is everywhere. But hope is not lost!”
Alongside these are paintings from other geographies of struggle. The Allahabad painting depicts a narrow room where women pause during a majlis, also the room where her father was born, offering a multigenerational intimacy. The Hisar painting, made around the 2024 Haryana elections, registers the exhaustion on women’s faces between campaigns. A Delhi riots painting absorbs the fear and proximity of bodies caught in sudden violence.
Women reappear across her canvases, seated, resting, waiting, watching. Raza’s canvases resonate with Roy’s reminder that “the RTI movement has largely been a feminist movement”, as women, veiled, unveiled, tired, rejoicing and angry, collectively occupy the sites she has documented with loyalty. Raza’s chromatic intensity, compressed space and elongated forms are a result of her “passionate engagement with colour and the early influence of the German Expressionists,” writes Sinha.
In frame: Rajasthan, RTI
The exhibition’s most expansive work, the May Diwas, Mazdoor Mela, Bhim, Rajasthan (2025) diptych, emerged from Raza’s time at this year’s 35th May Day mela with MKSS, where the struggle for rights and the aesthetics of resistance converge. The stage and audience fold into one composition: performance, food stalls, booksellers, banners and sleeping bodies coexist as parts of the same public culture. Loyal to the site she captures the human condition, skilfully collapsing multiple moments into a single frame. The perspective is broken many times to bring together scenes from three different mobilisations she attended in Bhim, Rajasthan.
Rajasthan, often stereotyped as barren, becomes a visual argument against such simplification. Roy reflects, “This is a country of very different colours, ways of thinking, religions. A place where we all live as equals, or at least have the right to.” Colour, she suggests, is inseparable from political life: “People see themselves in colour, never in black and white. They are not just two beings, they are several beings.” The paintings presented by Raza mirror this perspective. “Rajasthan showed me colours… When you enter the mela you are bombarded with colour, this is what directs your thoughts… It is too bright, but so is the reality of these people,” she says.
The mela is also a site of political imagination. As Nikhil Dey reminded the audience, “RTI said: the documents you rule our lives with, make them accessible to us.” The amendment through the DPDP Act, he argued, “has slaughtered the RTI’s own balance between privacy and public. Today you cannot ask for the name of anyone under RTI… Everything public is being defined as personal.” Without accountability, “all you are left with is propaganda.”
Speaking to history
Gayatri Sinha’s curatorial essay positions Raza within a lineage of artists who translate social rupture into visual form. “Aban speaks back to history,” she writes, “recording unresolved and festering issues… images that are both intimate and impersonal.” She highlights how Raza depicts “the crescendo-like climax of a protest and its fading from public memory.”
A broader philosophical arc runs beneath this continuity. Her works suggest that resistance is a duration, a rhythm of gathering, dispersing, waiting and returning. Equally, Dey puts it, “Struggle is also an expression, struggle is also a right.” Raza’s canvases hold this continuum, the hum of political life built by ordinary citizens insisting on accountability. They foreground the politics of assembly, but also the unglamorous intervals.
That is where the exhibition’s title lands with full weight. Nothing Human Is Alien to Me reads as an ethics of responsibility, to paint without appropriation and to refuse forgetting. It gestures to a belief that as long as people gather, demand and remember, there will be artists standing at the threshold, listening and insisting that nothing human be treated as alien.
Nothing Human Is Alien to Me is on view at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Defence Colony, till December 15.