At Serendipity Arts Festival and Kochi-Muziris Biennale, artist Birender Yadav’s work gives voice to the migrant self

Yadav’s work emerges not from second-hand testimonies but his own observation and lived experiences of growing up in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, where his father and uncles worked as blacksmiths and miners. “My father would often draw and that is how I developed an interest in art,” he says. Encouraged by his school teacher in Dhanbad to pursue art, he enrolled at Banaras Hindu University. It is here that he began exploring the lives of brick kiln workers in Mirzapur by making frequent visits to sites. He has been conducting workshops with children for Artreach India. “I would often use clay while working with children and some of the techniques that I use actually came from that experience,” he says.

Birender Yadav’s work at Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa (Anshu Singh)

Now 33, Yadav has built more than a decade of art practice around questions of labour and identity. For instance, when he noticed how brick workers were not able to enrol for Unique Identification Number because they didn’t have an address, he responded with ‘Erased Faces’ (2014), where he asked them to stamp their thumbprints onto passport-sized portraits, creating for them an artistic documentation of sorts.

If ‘Walking on the Roof of Hell’ (2016) featured worn-out khadau (wooden) sandals as a reminder to the physical toll of labour, in another project he documented their working conditions in brick kilns, particularly how it was ironic that bricks named after goddess Durga weighed down on the women who carry them.

More recently, works such as ‘Re-Presented from the Traces’ (2021-22) have focused on objects left behind at kilns, where he has cast them as witnesses of migration and displacement. A 2019 residency in Switzerland also expanded his engagement with clay and casting processes. “I realised that one of India’s first modern brick kilns built in the 17th century near Bengaluru had a Swiss link,” he shares.

In some ways, Yadav’s present work bring together some of his several engagements. The manner in which the tools have been suspended at KMB, for instance, is just how his father hangs them at home. “I have often heard him say that the shape of the tools and the body of the worker changes together as both adapt to one another,” says Yadav.

While the entryway into his exhibit at Kochi has a cart with discarded bricks without any branding to represent the landless migrant labourers, the same sentiment is represented in Goa with the work ‘Life Tools’, that has their tools in clay placed alongside the khadau and a cast of their feet, which remain in perpetual transit of sorts.