The present body of works by Baroda based artist K. P. Reji are a continuation of his explorations into the organization of community life in

India and the manner in which this has become a political issue in contemporary India. However, what makes the present set of works distinct

from some of his more recent works on community is the way he has pushed the conceptual thresholds of his visual language in order to probe

further into the areas of community life in India, particularly the ways in which the Indian nation state has arranged the lives of its people.

He focuses on the way the nation state has set up a seemingly coherent bio political order for its own legitimacy as a sovereign power. The sites 

where Reji has chosen to work for the mapping of the ‘national’ and ‘modern’ in India are of course the paradigmatic sites of the family and the

state, the domains of the private and the public. What one sees across these set of works is a collapsing of these seemingly separate spheres

of life with their distinctions becoming historically irrelevant in the face of an emerging biopolitical order in India.  Reji’s works map this order

of life and the ways in which the lives of various communities are imagined in it. 

Reji’s representations of this new order are structured around an incisive examination of the category family. The family, as it emerges in this

body of work, is caught in the interstices of nation and capital. Rendered at moments of the intensely personal—during sleep, at play, setting up

a house or making love—the family nevertheless is shown relentlessly tied to governmental forces that shape its very contours. There is a 

sustained hint in these dramatic, even melodramatic depictions, that these figures are hardly individuated, in fact, they call to mind populations

and demographics, the subjects of a national order.