Empty walls, lone Tiranga photo: What's left at Raihan Vadra's show at Bikaner House

The controversy had already drawn attention to Raihan Vadra’s exhibition, No Idea Is Final, before I walked into Bikaner House. But what greeted me inside was not just an exhibition of photographs. It was a room full of absences.Visitors, many of them young, were streaming in. Some had come after seeing the controversy unfold on social media; others were curious about what remained of a show from which dozens of photographs documenting recent protests and youth movements in Delhi had been removed.“It is really sad that we couldn't see that. We know what's been taken away. Now I'm here to see what's really been left behind,” said Sakshi, 27. “It’s uncomfortable**,** really. I’ve been coming to Bikaner House for five years, and this incident puts it in a different light.”Vadra was also at the exhibition. He said he had not expected the reaction that followed the removal of the photographs. A TALE OF TWO FLOORSThe journey begins on the first floor, where the gallery offers a tranquil escape into nature. Brightly lit walls display serene landscapes and vivid wildlife photographs capturing raw wilderness, towering mountains and tranquil forests"That's how I got into photography-wildlife photography," Raihan Vadra said, discussing the origins of his artistic journey. "And, you know, it's one of my passions. So with this exhibition, I really just wanted to put out images that I liked."But it was the second floor, with its red walls, that made the controversy impossible to ignore.Nails remained where photographs had once hung. The walls were largely bare, with lights illuminating spaces that had been intended to hold images. The Preamble to the Constitution, with its references to liberty and justice, was written along the walls.The emptiness was difficult to miss. It was also difficult to separate from the circumstances in which it had appeared.“I would have liked to say that this is intentional, the nails and the projections, but it’s not,” Vadra told me. “This is just like we didn’t even have time, you know. They gave us till 4 pm yesterday and the exhibition was opening at 7 pm.”The blank spaces were not originally conceived as an artistic statement, he explained. They were the result of a last-minute removal that left the team with little time to prepare the exhibition for visitors.Walking through the room, Nikhil Jain, another visitor, saw the absence itself as a statement.“As you can see, like most of this hall, most of this exhibit is empty, just with nails and lights. And I think this is speaking volumes. I think this is speaking about the state of democracy in the country, that, like, you can’t even show photos of a protest,” he said.A 21-year-old visitor described the experience as a chance to witness the contradictions of the moment.“You know, I'm able to feel the nature. I'm standing there in the mountains. Perhaps I was here to witness some of the most democratic and undemocratic things happening by the regime,” the visitor said.The exhibition also drew people who had not necessarily planned to visit before the controversy. The attention surrounding the removal had become part of the story itself.So, here's what's left behind: a crowd drawn in by social media buzz, Congress politician Jairam Ramesh, empty spaces on the walls, the iconic Tiranga photograph and a whole lot of wildlife.For Vadra, the controversy raises questions about more than the fate of a single exhibition. He said artists should be able to show their work without having their voices suppressed, and that public institutions must be accountable to the creative communities that use their spaces.“No artist's voice should ever be suppressed. And second is that I'm trying to put out there that public institutions like Bikaner House must be held to account and must be responsible to the ecosystem of artists, gallerists, curators that give this venue, that make this venue what it is,” he said.Vadra plans to take the exhibition to Bengaluru next.- Ends