There are bodies that build, and bodies that desire. Bodies that carry, lift, break, touch, embrace, endure. In Charan Jadhav’s Labour Diary, these are not separate bodies. They are one and the same—vulnerable, desiring, exhausted, intimate, possessing ceaseless capacities.
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| Artist: Charandas Jadhav |
For a long time now Charan’s practice has
been obsessed with the human body. What began as a very interesting exploration
of mutilated animals transcended to violated flesh. The act of violation
further led him to psychosexual turmoil of the physical body taking him to the
not so gentle lanes of flesh trade. For years Charan wandered in the red light
areas in and around Bombay documenting and reflecting on the lives of the women
practicing prostitution. His line expressed the complex emotional retaliation
of their lives he felt for them, turning his works to an odd combination of
disgust, pity and erotica simultaneously. What we see happening in this show
parabolic slide to looking at bodies in turmoil, as Charan has moved from one
form of physical labour to another. While he looked as sex workers and their
consumers as bodies in vigour and decay, he continues to do the same with
labour on site not very different. The passion here is much more raw, as
loneliness and distance acting as triggers for active erotic imagination.
Charan here presents not only the world
of labour, he is very much part of it- construction sites, workers, tools, raw
materials and structures in the process of becoming. His labourers are not
distant figures observed from the outside. Their bodies hold the marks of
work—the weight of what is carried, the repetition of gesture, the fatigue of
the everyday. Their hands become both instruments and witnesses. They build the
world, even as the world leaves its traces upon them. The tools transform into
memories of pleasure and objects of desire as an innocent tape or digger
surreally become genitals.
But labour, in Jadhav’s universe, does not end at the construction site.
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| Nippon Gallery Mumbai |
His very delicate, yet direct erotic
drawings are another kind of physical encounter: the private, tender and erotic
labour of intimacy. Here, the body is no longer seen only as a body that works,
but as a body that longs, touches, gives and receives. These drawings carry the
vulnerability of allowing the intimate to become visible. Desire is treated
neither as spectacle nor as confession, but as another deeply human form of
making—a coming together from which something new might emerge.
It is this movement between construction
and creation that gives the works their emotional force. Jadhav’s tools begin
to mutate into sexual and reproductive forms. The hammer, pipe, drill and other
implements of construction acquire the contours of flesh and anatomy. The
objects through which we build our external world begin to resemble the organs
through which we create life. The distinction between tool and body, production
and reproduction, begins to tremble.
In these transformations, the
construction site becomes strangely intimate. Metal begins to feel bodily;
flesh begins to feel architectural. The language of labour slips into the
language of desire, and the act of building becomes inseparable from the impulse
to create, connect and continue.
Perhaps this is where the diary becomes
most personal. Beneath the images of workers and tools lies a meditation on
what it means to spend oneself in the world—to give one’s strength, one’s time,
one’s body, and sometimes one’s love. Every structure is built through an
expenditure of the body. Every relationship asks for another kind of labour.
Every life carries the evidence of what has been given to it.
Labour Diary
is therefore not simply a record of work. It is a diary of the body itself: its
labour and its longing, its exhaustion and its tenderness, its capacity to
build and its need to be held. What remains is the trace of the human hand—on
stone, on metal, on another body, and finally, on life itself.
Snehal Tambulwadikar-Khedkar
Art Historian, Artist, Academician
Curated by Snehal Tambulwadikar
Labour Diary | Solo Exhibition
Nippon Gallery is pleased to present “Labour Diary”, a solo exhibition by Charandas Jadhav, bringing together an array of thoughts expressed through drawings, paintings and sculptures.
The exhibition reflects on labour, everyday life, observation and the human experience, presenting the artist’s personal visual language through a diverse body of work.
📅 Preview: 13 October 2026
🕔 5:00 PM onwards
📅 Exhibition: 13–17 October 2026
🕒 3:00 PM – 7:00 PM
📍 Nippon Gallery
Flora Fountain, Fort, Mumbai – 400001
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