In 2008, Vadodara-based Rajasthani multidisciplinary artist Lochan Upadhyay won the prestigious Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) Public Art Grant for his large-scale site-specific installation 'Power of Cloth'. The project saw Lochan reconstruct a wedding-shamiana to examine questions of marriage, caste, and local social structures. Using cloth — a central element in India's rural social and ceremonial life — as his starting point, he examined its role in shaping power and tradition. Rooted in the Vagad region of Rajasthan, the work opened a dialogue with the local community through familiar social forms.
Upadhyay's new exhibition, In Search of a Space, marks a shift from his earlier large-scale, socially driven installations toward something quieter but no less political: the question of home. Known for work rooted in caste, gender, and spatial politics, Upadhyay now turns his gaze inward, exploring how memory, shelter, and dislocation shape the way we inhabit space.
Based in Vadodara, Upadhyay's multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, drawing, and site-specific community work. He is also a founding member of the Sandarbh Artist Residency, which brought contemporary art into the rural setting of Partapur, Rajasthan — his hometown and a long-standing anchor for his work. Upadhyay's dialogue with place continues through Partapur Studio, his ongoing design venture that produces functional objects rooted in regional craft and sculptural ideas.
In Search of a Space deepens these concerns. Through sculptural forms, found materials, and layered compositions, Upadhyay traces the outlines of domestic life — fragmented walls, hollowed vessels, improvised shelters. The exhibition does not offer direct representations, but rather gestures towards the emotional architecture of a home. His forms suggest shelter while questioning its stability. Questions like what defines a home and who gets to claim it guide this meditative exploration of home as a site of memory, emotion, and negotiation.
The exhibition reframes home not as a static space but one that shifts with time, memory, and migration. Upadhyay's earlier themes of town planning, mobility, and social structure return in this body of work, now transformed and filtered through layers of personal longing. In this, his work echoes a broader South Asian experience, where home is often a site of rupture — due to partition, displacement, labour migration, or changing economic landscapes. Upadhyay renders these conditions not through didactic visual language but through abstraction and suggestion, allowing viewers to enter the work through their own memories of home.
'In Search of a Space', an exhibition by Lochan Upadhyay, will be on view at the Public Arts Trust of India Exhibition and Learning Centre, Jaipur, from 8 July 2025 till 17 August 2025.
Follow Public Arts Trust of India here.
Follow Lochan Upadhyay here.
If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:
Pragati Dalvi Jain’s ‘A Pound of Feathers’ Explores The Emotional Labour Of Motherhood
Armaan Bansal Talks Recontextualising Indian Aesthetics, Design As Sensation, & More
Building Benne: In Conversation With Indian Designer Reshmy Kurian