Confronting an emigrant’s struggle to belong in a new place, Hema Upadhyay’s work narrates her personal and artistic transition to Bombay. Born in Baroda and trained in painting and printmaking there at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Upadhyay shifted to Bombay after completing her education. Having experienced a journey paralleling that of the hordes who arrive in Bombay seeking work each year, the artist became a self-aware agent for the anonymous urban migrant. In her renderings of displacement, Upadhyay privileges her own impressions of the urban landscape and the performative gesture.

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