Neel ambar

Experimenter presents Neel ambar, Vikrant Bhise’s first solo in Kolkata and with the gallery, bringing together an ambitious and expansive body of work that serves as an archive of the Ambedkarite movement, using the colour blue to articulate a collective consciousness.

In this exhibition, blue embodies B. R. Ambedkar’s boundless vision across scholarship, resistance and assertion against caste oppression. It figures as a chromatic visual language of collective identity, aspiration, and cultural belonging. Samata, or equality, a core principle for the anti-caste movement, finds a symbolic expression in this blue. As an Ambedkarite artist, Bhise thinks through forms of equality, placing himself within the historic moment when the Republic of India was established and the Indian Constitution came into effect. Drawing from the traditions of the Phule-Ambedkarite movement, his works foreground the citizens of India, particularly the oppressed and labouring communities.

Against the current socio-political realities, Bhise’s practice underscores labour, protest, and equality as visual and conceptual frameworks for understanding the anti-caste struggle. Drawing on cultural observations and literary traditions rooted in Ambedkarite scholarship, he develops a kinetic visual language and creates atmospheric narratives that traverse histories and geographies. His works serve as registers of collective memory grounded in lived realities rather than transcendence. He renders figures and architectural forms on muted terrains, using bold, sweeping brushstrokes to create a distinct artistic vocabulary. His visual forms oscillate between entanglement and equanimity. These gestures activate the spatial and temporal dimensions, by turns collapsing, resurrecting, or remaining suspended in a continuous flux.

Bhise’s practice builds on Ambedkar’s emancipatory ideals. His works become more resonant when situated within the larger framework of this exhibition, in which Bhise chronicles the memory and experiences of the Dalit-Bahujan community, alongside various trajectories of the anti-caste movement, transforming them into a visual archive that subverts hegemonic narratives surrounding caste in the Indian subcontinent. In Neel Ambar, there are no myths, no barriers; rather a vast, unfolding expansion of metta (kindness), karuna (compassion), and ahimsa (non-violence)—reminiscent of the sky and its limitless horizon.