Shubham Kumar’s painting is from his solo exhibition “Ghare, Khet, Dera” which is rooted in the convoluted past and narratives of caste-based and communal violence as well as land politics. A deeply personal artwork, the paintings tell anecdotes and stories of his immediate family and how they experienced the turmoil and fragmentation. Generally, home is associated with safety and security, the four walls allowing us to separate the external politics from our private lives- however, Shubham shows us how the belief is one of privilege, and ignorance and can only be enjoyed by those unaffected by on-ground conflicts. The artist wants to expose the 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 hyperrealist paintings. 

Recalling precarious times of conflict between Maoist revolutionaries and landowning families, the paintings inhabit deep anxiety, constant movement and restlessness. They follow the title of the exhibition- 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). The deep shade of blue in the two paintings shows the external- the terrorising sky, the night which allowed for escape but was riddled with the unknown. The red in the painting speaks to the violence within the four walls, the constant fear of living in threat, robbing the family of peace of mind. The 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, they do not have the privilege of choosing to be apolitical. The last two paintings show Aaris in the Khet- physical informal boundaries between farmlands, created by piled stones, which was the site of most violence. The title of these paintings is complex to decode, which is perhaps the intention of the artist- a monument is a physical memory of the dead— therefore when the protagonist is escaping in the night, he is reminded of the threat of death as well as the death of those who travelled the same path as him before. It leaves the viewer with a melancholic impression, for those who attempted to escape the rampage could only associate death with hiding, which had become a reflex and an instinct for them— as it was second nature and nostalgic to them over time.