Between Iron and Dust: The Invisibilization of Being
By Ranjan Kaul
Avijit Dutta’s practice emerges from his memories and lived experiences in the industrial city of Howrah. Born and raised in Howrah, Dutta through his evocative art reflects on the social realities of his native place and the daily struggle of workers to eke out a living for survival. In the thoughtfully conceived works, human limbs, bodies, and stray dogs intertwine and become inseparable from the machines, and other inanimate objects. Such imageries bear witness to the iron grit, resilience, and resolve of the workers.
Dutta moved from Howrah to Kolkata to do his BFA (Painting) from the College of Visual Art (2020) and subsequently completed an MFA (Painting) from the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata (2022). Thereafter, he returned to his home in Howrah to continue his practice, anchoring his work on the faceless workers in the city, drawing upon his intimate familiarity with the city and its people.
Linked to Kolkata by the Howrah Bridge across the Hooghly river, Howrah is a hub of iron foundries, iron pipe manufacturing plants, cotton and jute mills, and other industries, offering employment to its residents that includes generations of migrant workers. It is a typical industrial city with cramped dwellings and streets teeming with local residents and migrants. The diverse social milieu gives rise to grave socio-cultural conflicts between local and migrant workers owing to their mutual distrust and antagonism. even as they relentlessly wage a shared struggle for subsistence day after day.
For the past few years, experimentation with different locally sourced materials as mediums for his mixed media works has become Dutta’s major focus after his art education. In his 2024 series Trying to Analyze the Landscape, for example, Dutta explored a combination of soil, clay, brick dust, soil, and iron powder. A number of his earlier paintings were small and somewhat abstract, representing tools of factory labour, cross-sectional views of iron pipes and grille windows, fragments of workers engaged in various activities.
A few early works were surreal and figurative, for example, Mystery I (2022) which depicts two workers with their heads inside nylon bags. Tikiapara Landscape I (2023), a diptych, also portrays a distressing scene of exhausted workers finally resting after a hard day’s labour. Feeling insecure and vulnerable, they huddle together, like peas in a pod, with heads covered by thongas (Bengali for paper carry bags) serving as protection, as it were.
The nylon bag and thonga are recurring motifs in Dutta’s visual vocabulary, serving as metaphors for shelter or protection, confinement, or anonymity. At times he paints on Nepali handmade paper that is of the size and shape of a regular thonga that he later fills up with filler material to achieve dimensionality. The thonga motif is derived from his family’s thonga business – his father collected old newspapers from the neigbourhood to make and sell them for a living. The heads inside thongas signify the predicament of the workers living identity-less, anonymous lives, oblivious of the world beyond their immediate surroundings.
Dutta has moved on in his most recent works from abstract open landscapes and singular narratives to larger works that portray Howrah’s workers and their quotidian lives with multiple, broader narratives rich in visual metaphor, allegory, and symbolism. The simpler narratives of the early works that used static, rigid figures are now more complex, yet, the natural progression and thematic contiguity in Dutta’s art journey is discernible even as he transitions to create bolder works with multiple narratives.
The incongruous appearance of a lone trumpeter in a brass-band uniform on the factory premises in the triptych Inside the Factory II (2025) is enigmatic. While the trumpeter’s head is engulfed in a bag, a pair of disembodied hands in white cover his ears, as if the trumpeter doesn’t want to hear his own music. The workers go about their task completely unaware of him. We see some similarity in Factory III (2025), where in the left background a group of men watch an incident in the factory (not in the painting’s frame) with their backs to the viewer. Those digging in the foreground go about their work unmindful of the incident, while another worker snatches a nap. There is ambivalence here: is this simply a lack of awareness or a deliberate disinterest because they know of the dangers lurking around them?
The Labour Story (2025-26) series that captures incidents from daily life is suffused with irony and intrigue. Is the white hand behind the window grille on the extreme left that of a trapped person crying out for help? The man in the second painting can be seen performing a dance while he balances a heavy load of sacks. In the third work, a man trapped under a wire roll is being pulled out, but a cameraman has his lens directed at a pig rather than the injured worker. The fifth painting in the series is a satirical take on the male voyeuristic gaze.
We get a glimmer of a collective spirit of perseverance among factory workers in the two-work series Helpers. In Helpers II (2024) we see disinterest among some workers: while two workers work together to fill a sack, both of them are being restrained in the activity: one is pushed by a leg from behind, and the other is pulled away. The right half of the painting shows two men carrying away a dead or an injured worker, while others talk with each other unconcernedly.
There is a sense of unease and disquiet in the small, interconnected paintings in the series Internal Politics (2026) that dwell on the complex social dynamics of working-class life. While a cooperative and supportive spirit pervades the first two works in the series, in the third, the worker carrying a heavy load mocks and abuses another by an abusive hand gesture – an upturned middle finger. From his mouth flows out a stream of fluid that collects in a puddle, as though spewing invectives. The other works are even more fascinating: a sewage worker with his head buried in a drain opening; a man clicking a photo through a face shield and at the same time bending to lift a load; another posing for the camera with a victory sign. Such surreal imageries infuse an additional layer to the otherwise mundane stories of workers going about their humdrum lives.
The overt hostility and mockery seen in Internal Politics is symptomatic of the broader reality of the workers’ interrelationships. Equally intriguing are the spectral bodies and limbs that add mystery. Appearing unexpectedly out of script, as it were, these white shadowy fragments lend an eerie, dramatic edge and movement to the compositions.
Many of Dutta’s recent works reflect on the prevailing social tensions and fracture between workers where the narrative moves from the visible to the invisible — from open mockery to a deliberate lack of concern. This fracture surfaces most explicitly in Dutta's most recent nine-work series Layers of Obsession (2026). where the artist continues to be preoccupied with the depiction of Howrah’s workers and their social milieu. As in a couple of his earlier series, the paintings, comprising fragments from real-life everyday incidents in Howrah, have been painted on filled-in, three-dimensional, thonga shapes. The surreal series is a dispassionate depiction of the prevailing social tensions and conflicts between the characters, where duplicity is often embodied in a single figure, and exclusion is given a distinct, gendered form.
There are two works in the series of a two-faced man as the main protagonist: in one, a man shouts at another through a loudspeaker; in the other, a figure appears magically from a pedestal, letting out a stream of abuse. In a couple of works in this series, interestingly, Dutta brings women to centre stage. In one we see a woman with folded legs seated on iron spikes while a male figure from behind covers her eyes; the other painting shows a woman with her head inside a thonga, cooking in a latticed-work
The imaginatively choreographed narratives of workers make us palpably aware of the pathetic situation of iron-industry workers. While the artist unapologetically scrutinizes the cultural prejudices and antagonism among workers, what finally emerges is an aesthetically rendered portrayal of Howrah’s industrial habitat with its hardships and socially tense workplace.
Dutta’s work has immediate relevance today. The faceless workers become signifiers of survival, confinement, and anonymity of a labouring population and suggestive of the gradual erosion of individuality, dignity, and aspiration. The compulsions of migration for employment, the consequential social fractures, and the precarious nature of workers’ collective action point to a deeper malaise in contemporary society. The works are a microcosm of the larger existential issues of the human condition: of the dull drudgery of workers’ lives, their alienation from their surroundings, the complexities in their social relationships, predicaments of migration, the politics of communities. An elegy to resilience, perseverance, and vulnerability, Dutta’s art reminds us that the factory site is a terrain of toil, sacrifice, and crushed dreams.
(This is an abridged version of the essay included in the catalogue of Avijit Dutta's solo exhibition, Chronicles of [un]Seen Labour[er]. Those wishing to read the full essay, as well as essays by Soumya Mukhopadhyay and Tariq Allana, can contact Art Heritage directly at ahg@arthertiagegallery.com.)
(All images are courtesy of Art Heritage and Avijit Dutta, and reproduced here with permission. © Art Heritage and Avijit Dutta)
Text copyright ©Ranjan Kaul
Ranjan Kaul is a visual artist, art writer-critic, curator, author, and Founding Partner of artamour. His works may viewed on www.ranjankaul.com and his insta handle @ranjan_creates.
(The views and opinions expressed by the contributors in their articles, features, and interviews on artamour are solely those of the individual authors/artists and do not necessarily reflect the views of artamour or its owners.)
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