Collection: Awajjan

Artist - Kumar Misal
Paintings on handmade paper made from local waste

Awaajjan || अवाज्जाँ  — translating to “voices” — is an anthology of acoustic memories made visual by Kumar Misal. It listens closely to the valleys of the Dhauladhar, where echoes of livelihood, ritual, and quiet survival are steadily drowned by the rhetoric of progress. The series gathers these voices before they disappear, suspending them on handmade paper that is itself born of local waste — material that carries its own history of use, discard, and renewal.

Each work by Kumar here operates as both witness and warning. The drawn figures, animals, and landscapes are neither decorative nor neutral — they stand as witnesses to the vanishing. Their gestures and presences are charged with a quiet urgency, becoming metaphors for entire worlds under erasure. The mountains, trees, and shepherds here are not mere subjects; they are the last remaining narrators of a story that risks being silenced. Materially, the series challenges the logic of extraction and consumption by turning residue into a site of resistance. The frayed edges and grain of the paper become part of the imagery, marking time, loss, and resilience simultaneously.

In Awaajjan, the viewer is not a passive spectator but an implicated listener. These works demand a slowing down, a step back — a space to reckon with what is being built, what is being lost, and what survives as memory. In giving form to these voices, the series insists that the local is not peripheral, that the small is not invisible, and that what is at stake is nothing less than identity and existence itself.