Throughout his life, Mohd Intiyaz, a visual artist from Jharkhand, has been enmeshed in situations and family experiences that had a lasting impact on his memories and artistic sensitivity. His artwork often sheds light on crucial childhood events related to migration and marginalisation. Realising many of these hardships were not unique, but often a shared reality, he started to question why injustice is overlooked as a societal norm, and why it is so hard to talk about it openly. His works in a new show, ‘Can We Talk’, at Method Kalaghoda in Mumbai, convey underlying questions on labour, production, protest, and identity.
Pictured here is ‘Age 8’, a mixed-media canvas addressing the difficulties involved in fetching water. When Intiyaz was eight, his family did not have a water supply connection at their rented accommodation in Delhi. They would fetch water from a municipal water tank. The people in the queues were desperate and vicious, he says, because water was limited and the people, endless. He recalls an incident when a woman in the queue snatched his bucket and threw it away just because he was a renter.
Intiyaz has an MFA in painting from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, and was the recipient of the FICA and Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation Emerging Artist Award 2020.