Rahul Mitra

Region: West

 I bring visual and cultural language drawn from the media to the streets in order to interpret personal, sociopolitical dialogues exploring poverty, ennui, custom, love, strangeness, technology, linguistics, and science. My art is based on research on global cultural disparities that I extract from the words and phrases found in the current news media across the globe, on which I perform statistical analyses to rank them based on their significance and transform them into “pictographs” in my drawings and paintings, using acrylics, oils, and inks. I also collaborate with marginalized communities in cities across the world and invite them to paint on thrown-away cardboard boxes, collected in situ, and install the collectively painted boxes onsite as an ephemeral art installation called Box City. In addition, I make linocut prints and sculptures based on my drawings.