As an artist, Sanjib Mondal responds to his immediate microsystems, while situating himself within the broader projections of historical subjecthood in South Asia. His recent work addresses issues that resonate with his personal sense of 'un'belonging within the urban art world, while also connecting himself to the larger, global concerns of precarious humanity. Recalling his community’s historical experiences of despair, his ongoing practice tries to imagine and reflect the gaze of the social and cultural elites he encounters in the city of Kolkata and their and how their internal and inherited social cultural spaces normalize the ‘little presence’ of the marginalised. A crucial aspect of Sanjib's work is the conceptualization of the artwork’s ‘size’, where the physical dimensions themselves become a language that displaces the cultural-behavioural expectations of these spaces. His intervention interrupts the linearity of visual and narrative norms of visual art. By shifting to the question of scale from the sole authority of the visual, Sanjib’s spatial playbook redefines the perception of 'small presence' and radically contest the established hierarchies of artistic representation and the logic of its commodification. Charcoal, one of the primary media that Sanjib employs in his work, also stems from the caste-class dynamics of the social spaces he inhabits. The medium signifies how labor and intensity of work are connected to social contempt and the forms of vertical hierarchy in those inhabited spaces.
Text, often erroneously spelled, appears as a significant factor in Sanjib's works, as he continually recalls the image of people historically excluded from the literary mode of education. The modernist paradox, where text holds a central role in practical and educational domains, has exacerbated the marginalization of individuals historically deprived of literacy. In contemporary society, this paradox has evolved into a discourse on merit. The historically oppressed segments of the society is labelled as ‘naturally’ unworthy of any dignified existence, and notions of merit has been a key tactic to scandalize any form of their upward mobility through literary mode of education. The subjecthood in these spaces is inhabited by the tribe of what Dr. Ambedkar called "broken men" – the Antyajas – placed at the margins of caste society, a position that remains unchanged throughout the ages of history and across the so-called colonial-postcolonial-global-posthuman rhetoric. Its antithesis as the politically mobilized, organsed Dalit identity, which shatters the constraints of century-old systems and asserts its liberated and inclusive worldview. Emerging from this liberatory tradition, Sanjib’s practice broadly manifest from a place of personal experience and the collective generational memory of enduring the complexities and hardships of caste-life.