Not an Extra: Inside the Opening of a South Asian Art Exhibition
- Artlune
- Apr 21
- 5 min read
Before introducing the exhibition, Vikas Garg opened with a line from feminist scholar Bell Hooks that he felt captured everything Not an Extra is about.
"To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body."
Simple. And yet when you sit with it, it opens up into something much larger. Because that is exactly what this exhibition is asking us to think about: What does it mean to exist within a structure, to be part of it, to sustain it, and yet never be fully acknowledged within it?
On 15 April, we opened Not an Extra. And what followed was one of the most honest, warm, and genuinely moving conversations we have had around art in a long time.
How Not an Extra Began: Idea Behind This Online Art Exhibition
Co-curator Li Yu shared how the exhibition took shape. It started with going through Portia Roy's entire portfolio.
"During that looking through, something became really clear. Many of her subjects were about people in daily life in India and when we went really deep behind those works, we found the common thread that they are all in constant movement."
From there, research followed. Not just about the images Roy was creating, but about the real lives behind them. Before the exhibition was discussed in any formal way, Li paused and asked the room a simple question.
"When you walk around the cities, you might see workers carrying heavy loads or cleaners on the street. Have you ever noticed them? Have you ever thought about where they come from and where they might go at the end of the day?"
It was a small question. But it quietly set the tone for everything that followed.
The Works, the Stories and the People Behind Them
Artist Portia Roy talked about the works the way you talk about things that happened to you personally. Because for her, they did.
She spoke about the COVID lockdown in India. About the millions of migrant workers who lost their livelihoods overnight when factories shut and wages stopped. About the ones who, with no transport and no money, began walking home. Hundreds of kilometres. Along railway tracks, because the trains were not running and the tracks felt safe.
"There was no food at home, either. There was no money at home. But at least there were some people with whom you could maybe embrace fate. It becomes easier."
They were not walking towards comfort. They were walking towards people.
One night, a group stopped to eat and sleep on the tracks. A goods train was running. Most of them did not survive. That event became the work Home is Where I Prefer to Die. And the work Foot Tells a Thousand Stories came from a photograph Roy came across of a blood-soaked slipper left by the roadside.
"If the slipper can tell us so much," she said, "then I think this foot can also tell the stories of the roads it has travelled and what it has faced."
One of the most striking things about Roy's work is what is missing from it. In Foot Tells a Thousand Stories, there is no face. Just a foot, enormous and carved in extraordinary detail.
The migrant worker's face, she explained, is already invisible. Already anonymous. Already reduced to a case number or a statistic before the artwork even begins. What the records cannot capture is the physical reality of the journey. The specific weight of every step taken over hundreds of miles. That is what the foot holds.
“The Extras” Series: How a Global Refugee Crisis Became a South Asian Art Exhibition
The Extras series, which gives the exhibition its name, began in 2016 at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. Roy had just returned to work after a four-year break following the birth of her daughter.
"That was the time of the Syrian refugee crisis. And this is, of course, Alan Kurdi, whose body washed up to the shore and it became an iconic image of what migration actually looks like."
Roy was a mother. Her daughter was four years old at the time. The image was too much. It had to go somewhere. And it went into the woods.
Laura noted something striking about how Roy responded to that image compared to other artists who worked from the same photograph. Most rendered it in grey tones, muted and sombre. Roy used colour, bright, vivid and almost jarring colour.
Roy smiled. "That Indian background of mine, there is colour around me, you know."
But there was something more to it. In India, you see death surrounded by colour. Funerals are processions. Grief is loud and bright. And as Jose from Grapa added, the same is true in parts of Spain and Nepal. The celebration of a life, not just the mourning of its end. In Not an Extra, that tension between colour and sorrow is present in every single work.
Social Impact Art: Why Portia Roy Says Personal Is Always Political
When Vikas asked Roy whether she sees her practice as personal or political, her answer came without hesitation.
"Personal is political. Everything personal is very much political."
She spoke about visiting the colonies near her home in Delhi, talking to migrant workers, and listening to their stories. About how most of them are Bengali, like her, and how that shared language opened doors. About noticing the body language of people in service, stooped shoulders, eyes down, agreeable to everything, just trying to stay invisible.
"I feel that my mere existence, the presence of my body in a space, can cause danger for me. And I have seen that in them, too."
The connection between her own vulnerability as a woman moving through public space in northern India and the vulnerability of the workers she depicts is not abstract for Roy. It is lived. It is felt in the body.
Jose from GRAPA added something that stayed with everyone. He talked about how in cities, nobody looks each other in the eye anymore. In small villages, eye contact is how you see someone. Really see them.
Roy smiled. That, she said, is exactly why most of the figures in her works look directly at the viewer.
"To make that eye contact that is absent. That I have also been noticing."
Visit This Online Art Exhibition and Explore the Works
Not an Extra is more than an exhibition. It is the beginning of a conversation that we believe needs to keep going.
As James, who joined the opening relatively new to the art world, put it simply and honestly, knowing the story behind the works made everything easier to understand. That art, when it carries a story, becomes something anyone can connect with. Roy agreed without hesitation.
"Stories are human. Stories connect us."
The exhibition is live and running until 15 May 2026. Alongside the works, the exhibition is accompanied by more events to come. An Artist Talk with Portia Roy. A Curated Tour through the exhibition. A Curator's Talk with Shalu Yadav. Each one is a chance to go deeper into the work and the conversations it opens up.
As Vikas said in closing, "Not an Extra has not stopped here. It is just the beginning of a big conversation."
The exhibition is now live on our website, completely free and accessible from anywhere in the world. Go and spend some time with the works. Read the stories behind them. And then ask yourself the question Li asked at the very beginning.
Have you ever really stopped to look?
Visit Not an Extra now on our website.
