Atul Bhalla
“Auscultation: False Clouds and Real Deluges”
Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

During a tea break in Ranjeetpura, a village in Rajasthan’s Bikaner district, the multidisciplinary artist Atul Bhalla noticed marbled sandstone on a nearby fence that resembled a piece of meat. After bringing the stone home, Bhalla featured it in The Table (2023), an installation in his exhibition “Auscultation: False Clouds and Real Deluges.” Here, he placed it at an angle on a long dining table, its hardness a counterpoint to the fragility of the surrounding wine glasses and fine crockery. The Table also recalled one of Bhalla’s earlier photographic works, Still Life with Fictitious Object (2017), in which he photographed meat of indeterminate origin on a white plate. At the time, its significance was clear: the rising tide of intolerance in India that had led to the 2015 lynching of a Muslim man by a Hindu mob on suspicion of having slaughtered a calf and storing the beef at home.