Badush Babu

(b. Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala)

Badush Babu works almost exclusively in charcoal, a material he treats less as a medium than as an extension of thought. Trained at the Raja Ravi Varma College of Fine Arts and the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram (MFA), he has spent the past five years building a practice that moves between drawing, soot impressions, stop-motion and documentation.

The central subject is transformation, and the medium itself enacts it. Charcoal, born of transformation (wood reduced by fire), stains irrevocably yet remains fragile, can be erased but never fully undone. The conceptual frame Badush traces directly to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the book that gave him a way of thinking about how a body can become unrecognisable to itself, how grief or solitude rearranges the surfaces of a life, how matter moves between states while keeping the memory of what came before.

His ongoing Silent Stories series began as a meditation on physical and mental solitude, and on the small ways humans seek solace in the natural world. After the slow decline of his grandfather, who turned increasingly to the garden in his final years, the human figure receded from Badush’s drawings and a botanical vocabulary took its place: fallen flowers, dried leaves, the wings of dead insects, the residues of a life that withdraws to listen to itself. The drawings grow outward from a single sheet, with further sheets attached as the image demands, refusing predetermined edges, an additive logic that echoes vegetal growth itself.

Read alongside O. V. Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam and the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, his work extends a charcoal lineage shared with William Kentridge, Shanthamani Muddaiah, and Prabhakar Pachpute, artists for whom the medium is never static, always becoming. For Unfinished Histories, Badush brings the exhibition’s quietest and most patient voice: a meditation on craft, on solitude, and on the dignity of attentive looking.

Selected residencies: Lalit Kala Akademi, Kerala; Space Studio, Baroda; Plaksha Residency; dotwalk Ajitara Art Residency. Awards: Artist Rama Varma Raja Trust Scholarship for Best Student, 2017–18; Inception Grant, 2025. Selected collections: Abhishek Poddar / Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru.

The central subject is transformation, and the medium itself enacts it. Charcoal, born of transformation (wood reduced by fire), stains irrevocably yet remains fragile, can be erased but never fully undone. The conceptual frame Badush traces directly to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the book that gave him a way of thinking about how a body can become unrecognisable to itself, how grief or solitude rearranges the surfaces of a life, how matter moves between states while keeping the memory of what came before.

His ongoing Silent Stories series began as a meditation on physical and mental solitude, and on the small ways humans seek solace in the natural world. After the slow decline of his grandfather, who turned increasingly to the garden in his final years, the human figure receded from Badush’s drawings and a botanical vocabulary took its place: fallen flowers, dried leaves, the wings of dead insects, the residues of a life that withdraws to listen to itself. The drawings grow outward from a single sheet, with further sheets attached as the image demands, refusing predetermined edges, an additive logic that echoes vegetal growth itself.

Read alongside O. V. Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam and the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, his work extends a charcoal lineage shared with William Kentridge, Shanthamani Muddaiah, and Prabhakar Pachpute, artists for whom the medium is never static, always becoming. For Unfinished Histories, Badush brings the exhibition’s quietest and most patient voice: a meditation on craft, on solitude, and on the dignity of attentive looking.