By the time you stand before Naresh Kumar’s Bombay Rituals, you’re already engulfed. At his solo exhibition Act of Republic at Chemould Prescott Road, it stretches across the wall in a sweep of 484 miniature drawings, each made on a scrap of the now-defunct Yellow Pages telephone directory. From a distance, it reads as a live map of a metropolis in perpetual motion; up close, it fractures into intimate vignettes of Mumbai’s working class: its stevedores, mill workers, hawkers, and commuters.
Bombay Rituals comprises 484 drawings assembled as a single body—a useful reminder that Kumar treats the piece as an expandable organism that can be configured to the room. His choice of ground isn’t nostalgia; it is method. He draws “directly onto the pages, layering his mark atop what came before,” turning bureaucratic relics into a ledger of memory and movement. It’s a fitting substrate for an artist whose practice circles migration, belonging and the choreography of the everyday. Born in Patna and having lived in Sitamarhi, Delhi, Mumbai, Paris, and most recently Gwangju and Seoul, Kumar builds a migrant’s atlas out of ordinary gestures. These are drawings that “act as scripts to his performances,” staging the “performance of the mundane in everyday life.”
During a scholarship at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Kumar started excavating Mumbai’s colonial architectures, its mill districts, and the 1980s labour agitations; all subjects that haunt his Mumbai pictures. The gallery has repeatedly foregrounded his Paris year as a turning point; it’s also when the Yellow Pages as archive idea begins to make sense as both metaphor and medium.
Indigo arrives here not only as colour but as history; India’s “blue gold,” entangled with plantation economies and coercive colonial farming in Bengal and elsewhere. Mapped onto Mumbai’s ethos, the pigment reads as both stain and halo. Mica, meanwhile, brings a different sparkle: sourced in India’s “mica belt”—Jharkhand and Bihar, where extraction has long been tied to precarious, often illegal labour and a troubled child-labour economy. Kumar’s use of bright mica dust on throwaway pages is thus a quietly political formal choice: the city’s shimmer literally rests on mined glitter. If Bombay Rituals is the show’s public square, Residue(s) of the Future feels like its side streets as smaller works that keep faith with the same vocabulary: circular motifs that recur like lunar markers (a nod to the artist’s rural ritual memories), tiled crowds, signage, grids and scaffolds that turn the city into a provisional stage. Chemould’s notes underscore a deliberate, research-driven palette rather than found-object whimsy.
The exhibition text frames the thesis plainly: neither freedom nor belonging is straightforward; one always risks the other. Kumar’s republic is not a flag but an ongoing act of drawing, collecting, re-sequencing; his Mumbai is not a skyline but a swarm of gestures. Stand before Bombay Rituals and you feel that proposition in your body: a city built from the minor, the mundane, and the many; a republic assembled from scraps.