a wall made of holes | AMIYA RANJAN OJHA
9 January - 15 February 2025
Amiya Ranjan Ojha (b.1998, Mogalpatana, Odisha) is a printmaker with a masters in printmaking from MSU, Baroda (2024). His work has been exhibited in the Students’ Biennale of Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018, 2021). In 2023 he won the Odisha State Lalit Kala Academy Award for his work, Leaving, Non - Living and the all India Gold Grant by Prafulla Dahanukar Art Foundation for his work, Midnight. Ojha’s practice centres around the lived experience of migration, displacement, and belonging. He comes from a family of woodworkers with his father being a carpenter and his grandfather, a dollmaker. His woodblock prints express a special affinity for and keen grasp of the medium. The printmaker has a natural understanding of the material and his inherited craft is evident in the fine lines, texture, and depth he establishes in his work. His first Mumbai exhibition, a wall made of holes, is a collection of prints emphasising the grim realities facing migrants across India, the backbone of this country’s economic engine yet often obscured and erased from its glossy growth story. Depicting vignettes of their working and living conditions, Ojha’s black-and-white collection contrasts their stark existence as an underside to unremittant urban expansion and development. In Midnight, Ojha portrays himself along with roommates sleeping on storage racks in order to share the only available mosquito net in the dormitory at art school, evoking the stifling overcrowding of student dormitory life in which he finds resonances in the temporary dwellings of migrant workers. After his initial visit to the City of Dreams, Ojha produced the work, Endless Land but not mine, where he builds a surreal, seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape devoid of any traces of the natural or the man-made worlds. Individuals occupy crater-like spaces, in- volved in solo activity; all except two, who appear connected carving out a personal space to perhaps engage in an intimate conversation. Although Amiya’s imagery draws from the varied and distinctly different urban landscapes—Baroda and Mumbai; the artist finds similarities in the way makeshift housing is built; from personal clothing and frayed cloth; and the coop-like conditions in which people live.
Artworks
Amiya Ranjan Ojha in conversation with Shruti Ramalingaiah
a wall made of holes | AMIYA RANJAN OJHA in conversation with SHRUTI RAMLINGAIAH | 18 January 2025
Press
Amiya Ranjan Ojha

Amiya Ranjan Ojha (b.1998, Mogalpatana, Odisha) is a printmaker with a masters in printmaking from MSU, Baroda (2024). His work has been exhibited in the Students’ Biennale of Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018, 2021). In 2023 he won the Odisha State Lalit Kala Academy Award for his work, Leaving, non-Living and the all India Gold Grant by Prafulla Dahanukar Art Foundation for his work, Midnight.
Ojha’s practice centres around the lived experience of migration, displacement, and belonging. He comes from a family of woodworkers with his father being a carpenter and his grandfather, a dollmaker. His woodblock prints express a special affinity for and keen grasp of the medium. The printmaker has a natural understanding of the material and his inherited craft is evident in the fine lines, texture, and depth he establishes in his work.