Never Was A Man, 2025
Natural and synthetic dyes on industrially produced cotton, mirrors on steel dowels
Block printing and dyeing by Salemamad Khatri
Block carving by Pragnesh Prajapati
87 ½ × 52 inches each
With assistance from Madison Strižić and Hannah Ferguson

curated by Julia Eilers Smith

Max Stern Curator of Research

 

Installation view of Sightings 43: Never Was A Man, a project by Swapnaa Tamhane, Montreal, 2025

Courtesy of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery

Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro

SIGHTINGS
Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery
Concordia University, Montreal
curated by Julia Eilers Smith

Max Stern Curator of Research
 

This work takes two sentences from a letter written by Rohith Vemula: “Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of start dust.”  Vemula was a Dalit scholar and PhD student of Sociology at the University of Hyderabad, India. He wanted to be a writer (as he said, like Carl Sagan), and was a great reader of Dalit literature. In 2016, he took his life after being expelled from the university’s housing and public spaces due to being falsely accused of attacking members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a student wing of India’s right-wing BJP which Union Ministers supported. Vemula, who was part of the Ambedkar Students’ Association, went on a hunger strike and set up a camp where he and several students could sleep. They named their camp Velivada, or Dalit Ghetto. His poignant letter became a symbol of Dalit resistance, and brought to light caste discrimination faced within universities, leading to mass student protests across the country.
 

I have installed this work in the SIGHTINGS cube, located in the lobby Hall Building at Concordia University, Montreal, a site of historic student protests. From the 1969 Computer Centre Protest, when Black and Caribbean students denounced racist grading practices, to the 2002 protest against Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit for a talk at the university, to ongoing pro-Palestinian demonstrations calling for ceasefire in Gaza and for the university to divest from companies linked to arms manufacturers supplying Israel, the building carries a charged history of resistance.
 

Using wood-block printing on drop cloths – literally the material that is never supposed to be seen but is instead a waste material – Vemula’s words are endlessly repeated as a beautiful truth that should bind us, instead of dividing us. I am of a privileged caste, and I am quoting Vemula’s letter to consider the suppression that is occurring in an educational environment where conversation, debate, and equality should be prescient  instead of the silencing, oppression and discrimination that has unfolded on Concordia’s campus over this last year.