Mohit Shelare

Lives and works in Delhi, India

Artist statement

My practice begins with industrial leftovers, everyday waste, and the hidden systems through which hazardous substances are moved away from where we live. I am interested in what happens to things that a society wants to remove, hide, or keep at a distance and in the people whose labour makes this separation possible. In India, these systems have historically operated through the labour of untouchable castes; elsewhere, they continue to depend on marginalised and minoritised communities. Who cleans the city, and under what circumstances? What does it mean to live and work in relation to what others refuse to touch? How are the bodies that perform this labour seen, and what histories, social structures, and forms of exclusion shape that gaze? I am interested in the relationship between untouchability, sanitation, and the maintenance of the social world. I look at the infrastructures that organise impurity sewers, drains, waste systems, industrial sites, disposal networks and ask why both these infrastructures and the people who maintain them are made invisible within everyday life. But what is removed does not simply disappear. We cannot keep our leftovers outside. Waste moves through water, air, soil, materials, bodies, and institutions. It returns through what we eat, breathe, touch, and inhabit. Contamination does not remain contained within the systems designed to control it. It circulates, crosses boundaries, and creates relations between things that are otherwise...

Artwork