There is a certain kind of silence that settles over a demolition site after the machines have gone. The dust has fallen. The residents have moved on — or been moved. What remains are broken walls, splintered wood, and bricks. Ordinary bricks. Millions of them, scattered across the rubble of what were once homes, schools, neighbourhoods, lives.
For most, these bricks are debris. For sculptor Girjesh Kumar Singh, they are something else entirely. They are testimony. At the 2026 India Art Fair in New Delhi, Singh's exhibition Haal Mukaam — Current Location — stopped people in their tracks. Mounted entirely on reclaimed red bricks pulled from demolished structures, the installation asked a question that governments rarely want answered in public: what happens to the people when progress rolls through?
There is a long tradition in art of taking the discarded and making it speak. But Singh goes further than mere repurposing. A brick fired in a particular kiln, used in a particular wall, mixed with particular sand and mortar — it had lived somewhere. It had been part of the architecture of someone's daily life. When that life is dismantled by an official order, the brick does not forget. Singh's art insists that we remember too.
His method is deliberate and patient. He goes to demolition sites like a reader goes to archives, looking for a particular texture, a specific weight, a consistency that will hold meaning. "One brick might feel heavier, denser or rougher than another. There are variations in colour, texture, and weight. I may look for a particular size, but more than that I am attentive to the consistency. I pick it up, feel how it bonds with cement, judge its quality," he explains.
This attentiveness is itself a political act. In a world that demolishes and moves on without looking back, Singh looks back. He picks things up. He takes them seriously. He carries them with him.
What makes his sculptures arresting is not only what they show, but what they refuse to conceal. Singh deliberately leaves parts of his work unfinished — edges rough, surfaces raw. His chisel does not smooth every scar, for, as he understands it, to conceal a wound is to deny its truth.
This is where art diverges from official narrative. Governments that demolish homes in the name of development tend to present the story as complete: slums cleared, roads built, progress achieved. The wound is smoothed over. Singh's rough edges insist on the cost. The unhealed surface of a brick sculpture of a face — a face carved from the very walls that once sheltered someone — refuses the smoothing over. It says: this is not finished. The story is not resolved. The wound is still here.
Since these works are rooted in identity, the face becomes the first point of reference — the surface where our features, expressions, and choices in hair or headgear reveal who we are. Carving faces from the bricks of demolished homes creates a loop of terrible meaning: the home and the inhabitant have become one material, one broken thing, one question.
"Every address is provisional, every dwelling temporary, in constant flux like the tide of human life itself... we are always en route." — Girjesh Kumar Singh. This sentence hovers over the entire exhibition like a fact and a lament at once. It could be read as philosophy — the Buddhist impermanence of things, the wandering nature of the human condition. But Singh situates it within something more specific and more urgent: the anxious times we live in, where homes are taken not by the passage of time but by the decree of the powerful.
Displacement is not one event happening in one country. It is a pattern — repeated across borders, across centuries — where those with less power are moved to make way for those with more. The brick does not care which government gave the order. It remembers the hand that laid it and the hand that tore it down.
The Language of Materials
There is a concept in art theory — often attributed to the Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan — that the medium is the message. What you use to communicate is itself part of what you are communicating. Singh embodies this principle with unusual depth.
He could have painted images of demolished homes. He could have written about displacement. He could have photographed the rubble. Instead, he brought the rubble itself into the gallery. He made it speak in its own voice, in its own material.
"Some move in search of liberation, others by force of destiny. But the things that bind you to the construction never let go," he adds. This is the truth that official language struggles to contain. People do not simply relocate. They carry their broken mortar with them. Their sense of self, their memory of place, their identity as someone who lived somewhere — these do not dissolve with the bulldozer's engine.
Art as the Keeper of Uncomfortable Truths
When Singh's sculptures stand in a gallery and people ask which country, which conflict, which demolition drive they refer to, the ambiguity is not a failure of precision. It is a recognition of pattern. The pattern of the displaced face, the broken wall, the provisional address is universal enough that viewers from many worlds can step into it and recognize what they know.
Art also carries time differently than journalism does. A news story about a demolition drive may be forgotten within weeks. A sculpture made from those very bricks might stand for a century, continuing to ask its question long after the officials who signed the orders have been forgotten.
Singh's work at Haal Mukaam is, among other things, a counter-archive. Governments control official records. They decide what is preserved and what is erased. But the artist who walks through the demolition site and carries a brick away is also making a record — a record that no filing cabinet can contain and no bureaucratic directive can erase.
Consider what it means to carve a human face from the wall of a demolished home. The face is the most intimate surface of a person — the place where identity is legible to the world. The wall is the most intimate surface of a home — the place where a family's life is held and sheltered.
When these two become one material, one carved thing, the sculpture says something that no policy document can: the person and the home are not separate. To demolish the home is to demolish something of the person. The face that looks out from the broken brick is the face of someone who once lived there — or the face of all those who once lived there, or the face of every person who has ever had their address declared provisional by those in power.
Singh’s art does not offer solutions. It does not tell governments what to do, or tell displaced people where to go. What it does — what all great political art does — is refuse to let the truth be buried under the rubble. It picks up the broken thing. It carves into it. It places it in a room where people cannot look away.
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