Not an Extra

Not an Extra is an online exhibition presenting the work of artist Portia Roy, exploring displacement, social invisibility, and the human cost of living at the margins of political and economic systems.

Curated by Shalu Yadav and Yu Li, the project brings together visual art and research to examine the lives of those rendered peripheral by history, the migrant workers, refugees, and communities caught between movement and survival. Hosted by Artlune in collaboration with GRAPA, Not an Extra creates a space for attentive, research-informed looking, where the overlooked are brought to the centre.

Why Not an Extra?

We are undertaking Not an Extra because the lives this exhibition addresses are consistently present in global events, but consistently absent from the stories those events produce. Migrant workers, displaced communities, and those forced from their homes by conflict or crisis appear as data points in policy reports and background figures in news coverage. They sustain economies and cross borders, yet they remain legally vulnerable, socially unacknowledged, and historically unnamed.

As an organisation committed to social impact through art, Artlune believes that creative practice can do what policy language often cannot: restore individuality and dignity to lives that systems have reduced to categories. Roy's work, engraved into plywood and recycled cardboard, materials associated with transit and transport, makes this case in physical form. This project aligns with our mission to use art as a catalyst for meaningful dialogue, bringing together a decade of Roy's practice alongside academic research to offer a layered, evidence-grounded encounter with these realities.

Why We're Doing It

The works in this exhibition address ongoing and well-documented conditions. Research on India's 2020 lockdown reverse migration, Gulf labour classification systems, and international frameworks for forced displacement all confirm what Roy's work makes visible: that the precarity experienced by migrant and displaced communities is the product of structural failures, not individual circumstance.

Grounded in this evidence, Not an Extra is not simply an artistic response to a social issue. It is an attempt to hold the structure and the person shaped by it in the same space at once, and to ask:

What does the life of someone treated as peripheral by history actually mean?

Project Significance

Aim and Impact

Through Not an Extra, we aim to challenge how certain lives are rendered peripheral within dominant political and historical narratives, with particular attention to migrant workers and displaced communities whose vulnerabilities are structural rather than incidental.

By placing Roy's visual work in conversation with research on forced displacement, labour precarity, and migration governance, the exhibition aspires to move beyond abstraction and invite viewers into a more grounded understanding of what displacement actually means for the people who live it. We seek to foster reflection on the gap between those protected by social and political systems and those exposed to their failures, and to inspire more empathetic and informed engagement with these issues in public life.

Ultimately, Not an Extra aims to demonstrate that art and research, brought together with care, can hold space for lives that history has too often left in the background.

Join us for the sessions happening during the Exhibition:

About the Artist

Portia Roy is a visual artist who describes herself as a "stray dog on the streets of India." She isn't trying to change the whole world at once. Instead, she wants her art to be like a dog barking in the middle of the night, which is impossible to ignore, waking people up to the stories we usually look past.

She grew up in a small Bengali town during the communist era. At home, she heard her grandmother's stories about survival and the pain of Partition, while her father's bookshelf held works by Dostoevsky, Gorky, Kafka, and the Hungry Generation poets. Together, these stories and books shaped how she understood displacement and resilience from a young age. They taught her that for many people, the simple act of surviving and staying visible is a powerful form of resistance.

Portia's work is deeply personal. She took her own experiences of pain and transformed them into a language of empathy and protest. Today, she uses woodcuts and raw materials like recycled cardboard to tell the stories of those on the edges of society, the "extras" who sustain our world but are often left out of its history. For Portia, art is a way to "bark" at the world, demanding that we see the dignity and strength of those who are forced to move, wait, and survive in an unequal world.