Subodh Gupta’s ‘A Fistful Of Sky’ Is A Monumental Meditation On Migration & Belonging

“The artwork takes you beyond the idea through which the work was conceived,” Subodh Gupta says of his monumental, multidisciplinary practice. “And there is no boundary to it.”

When you consider the sheer scale of ‘एक मुट्ठी आसमान (A Fistful of Sky)’, Gupta’s ongoing solo exhibition at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in Mumbai, that statement feels like a glimpse into the artist’s creative aspirations almost three decades into his career. Spread across all four floors of the Art House — from the foundation to the summit — this is Gupta’s most expansive exhibition in a private Indian space to date. The show is dizzying in its scope — inducing something akin to submersion, the feeling of having walked into a world in perpetual motion. That Gupta achieves this effect using an obstinately ordinary vocabulary of cooking vessels, conveyor belts, tiffin boxes, and beds speaks to the artist’s awe-inspiring ability to make the monumental from the mundane.

Since his first significant installation, ‘Twenty-nine Mornings’ (1996), Gupta has worked in the liminal space where domestic ritual meets large-scale form, where the object of everyday life becomes the carrier of collective history. His stainless-steel accumulations have appeared at the Smithsonian, the Monnaie de Paris, and the National Gallery of Victoria.

The titular work, ‘एक मुट्ठी आसमान (A Fistful of Sky)’, comprises a field of polyester fabric-netted beds weighed down by construction materials — an allusion to the cramped, claustrophobic underbelly of Mumbai, where the bed is negotiated territory, proof of presence, the first and last thing a person claims in a city of plenty and not enough. Gupta is deeply attuned to this economy of abundance and scarcity. Subodh Gupta, (A Fistful of Sky), 2025-26, Mixed Media, Size variable.

“When I think about migration and labour, I come through everyday objects. A bed, or a protected space, becomes very important because wherever a person goes, they carry this need for shelter and a sense of belonging. The idea of the ‘sky’ is also important for me. It suggests something open, vast, and peaceful, something that belongs to everyone,” Gupta says. “At the same time, not everyone can access that feeling of peace equally. There is always a tension between this openness and the reality people live in. So the work connects these two things, the intimacy of a bed and the vastness of the sky. Through that, I try to speak about migration, memory, labour, and dreams in a quiet and human way. It becomes a reflection of how people carry their lives, their memories, and their need for safety across different places and situations.”

The irony of showing work about migrant labour, precarity, and the politics of rest inside a white-cube supported by and named after one of the country’s wealthiest families is not incidental here — nor is it lost in the spectacle of Gupta’s monumental sculptural installations. It is precisely the kind of productive friction that the best of contemporary art generates when it refuses to become décor. Gupta has never been oblivious to these contradictions in his practice. The object-markers and material detritus of underprivileged and middle-class lives — the steel thali, the battered bucket, and the ubiquitous tiffin box — are transformed in Gupta’s work. Whether that transformation is emancipatory or merely absorptive is the question he keeps revisiting in his work.

In ‘Faith Matters’ (2007–10), shown in India for the first time, Gupta sends stainless-steel utensils along conveyor belts in an endless loop that evokes industrial production and domestic labour simultaneously. Curator Clare Lilley writes of Gupta revealing “how repetition sustains community”, but the conveyor belt also makes visible how repetition sustains inequality. Meanwhile, ‘Proust Mapping’ (2024–26), stretching over nine metres, transforms flattened cooking vessels into a timeless archive of meals made and lives sustained over years of survival. Gupta draws this analogy himself: “After a point, these objects become timeless because of the energy and memory that they hold. When you put them together in a landscape, it almost reminds you of the cosmos.” The timescale de-individualises the object, shifting it from the anecdotal to the archival, from biography to deep time.

Mumbai is, in many ways, the ideal interlocutor for this body of work — a megacity constituted and sustained almost entirely by migration, where aspiration and precarity coexist, cramped within the same square foot. The netted beds are a manifestation of this: they are shrines to impermanence, to the provisional, tentative lives of those who do not yet know how long they will stay in this city.

What Gupta has built across three decades is a practice that insists ordinary objects are not ordinary at all — that they are dense with time, politics, and the histories of people who will never appear in any archive. This exhibition makes that case panoramically. A fistful of sky, after all, is not the whole sky. It is only what you can close your fingers around, wherever you are standing, looking up through the canopy of skyscrapers that are both within reach, yet so, so far way.

एक मुट्ठी आसमान (A Fistful of Sky) is on view at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), Mumbai, until 17 May 2026. The exhibition is presented by Nature Morte and curated by Clare Lilley. Learn more about the exhibition here.

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