This triptych is part of a larger series rooted in narratives of caste-based and communal violence as well as land politics. Deeply personal, the work tells anecdotes and stories of his immediate family and how they experienced turmoil and fragmentation. Shubham Kumar attempts to expose state-sanctioned frames and norms that are taken for granted to build nationalist majoritarian ways of seeing. By portraying the chaotic side of the truth, Shubham retraces escape and capture routes through his hyper-realist paintings. 

Recalling precarious times of conflict between Maoist revolutionaries and landowning families, the paintings inhabit deep anxiety, constant movement and restlessness. The title of the artist’s solo exhibition at Latitude 28 (2022) explores the same—navigating the tension of occupation and existence between Ghare (the ancestral home) and Dera (the encampment) centred around the Khet (the farmland, the source of conflict). It reveals a disorientation, a panic that overwhelms the body as it makes its way through the escape path, where now the land and the body both have become a site of violence. The blurry shift also is a note to how those at the bottom of the social hierarchy cannot afford to distinguish between the internal and the external, the body and the land or environment for they do not have the privilege of choosing to be apolitical. Shubham adds abstraction by painting the cursor, only visible when closely observed, in the series. He unfolds the project of fabricating the truth by those in power with the use of digital editing software; the mandated frame is consciously hidden when these dark histories are told.