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Riyas Komu’s Fourth World, installed at Nirox Sculpture Park outside Johannesburg in 2019, places B. R. Ambedkar in a deliberately unfinished South African landscape. Four concrete plinths point toward the cardinal directions: two carry statues of Ambedkar and two are empty. In Dilip M. Menon’s 2019 account for Scroll, that spare arrangement becomes an invitation to imagine wider conversations about caste, race, indigenous peoples, sexuality, younger generations and other lives pushed to the margins.
What was installed at Nirox Sculpture Park?
Menon describes Fourth World as four concrete plinths of different heights, set to face east, west, north and south at Nirox Sculpture Park in the Cradle of Humankind area outside Johannesburg. Two plinths support statues of Ambedkar; the other two remain vacant.
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Menon’s feature calls these the first Ambedkar statues on the African continent. That is a claim made in the 2019 article, not an independently verified fact here. The installation’s display status, ownership and visitor access after that presentation are not established by the available account.
| Element | What Menon reports | How its meaning is framed |
|---|---|---|
| Four concrete plinths | They differ in height and face the cardinal directions. | Menon asks whether the four levels might evoke the four-fold varna system, but the article does not establish this as Komu’s declared intention. |
| Two Ambedkar statues | They stand on two of the plinths, facing east and west. | Menon contrasts their address-like gestures with familiar images of Ambedkar holding the Constitution or pointing toward the future. |
| Two empty plinths | They are left unoccupied. | Menon reads them as room for other interlocutors, unfinished futures and voices not yet represented. |
Why place Ambedkar in South Africa?
The work makes Ambedkar’s political thought transnational rather than treating it as confined to Indian national history. Menon places Ambedkar’s analysis of caste and equality beside Gandhi’s political experience in South Africa, while also proposing possible South African interlocutors such as Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko.
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This is not a claim that Gandhi and Ambedkar held identical politics. Menon’s historical argument includes Gandhi’s racial ambivalence and Ambedkar’s intellectual influences, keeping their differences within the comparison. The setting instead creates a field in which distinct histories of hierarchy, resistance and political organization can speak to one another.
What do the gestures and empty spaces do?
Statues that address an audience
In much public iconography, Ambedkar appears holding the Constitution or pointing forward, presenting him as a lawgiver or guide. Menon describes Komu’s figures as gesturing as though they are addressing an audience. The change shifts attention from a fixed heroic emblem to a public exchange: who is being addressed, and who has the standing to answer?
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Plinths without ceremony
Ambedkar stands on the platforms without the ritual grandeur normally associated with a monument. Menon’s question about their differing heights—including a possible reference to varna—remains an interpretive question, not a settled explanation supplied by the artist in the cited material.
Vacancy as an invitation
The two open platforms prevent the installation from closing around a single historical subject. Menon understands them as spaces for other interlocutors and unimagined futures, including debates about race, indigenous communities, sexuality and younger generations. This is Menon’s reading of what the openness permits; the article does not provide a complete primary statement from Komu assigning each empty plinth a specific occupant.
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What does “Fourth World” mean here?
Menon presents Fourth World as extending the language of the “Third World” toward people excluded from global society. In the installation, that extension becomes a widening field of marginalized lives rather than a neutral political-science definition. The title therefore works as a proposition: the histories associated with anti-colonial nationalism are not the endpoint, because exclusion persists within and across nations.
That proposition also explains why the work’s emptiness matters. A finished monument can fix who counts as the subject of history. Komu’s four-way arrangement, as Menon interprets it, keeps the archive open to people and struggles that dominant narratives have omitted.
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Komu’s continuing engagement with Gandhi and Ambedkar
Menon connects Fourth World to Komu’s earlier work on both figures. His Gandhi series uses pairings such as “Satya/Perception” and “Ahimsa/Violence.” In Dhamma Swaraj (2018), a triptych, images of Gandhi and Ambedkar morph into one another. Menon treats that merging as deliberately ambiguous, not as proof that the two thinkers can be harmonized into one political program.
The article also reports Komu’s phrase “make art politically” when discussing an artist’s responsibility. It supplies no full interview transcript or extended primary quotation, so the phrase is best understood as Menon’s reported account of Komu’s position rather than a basis for attributing a detailed manifesto.
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An archive of the present
Menon asks what it would mean to create an archive of and for the present. His answer is not an archive in the institutional sense of documents stored for later consultation. He reads Komu’s sculpture as a history being made in public: a record of resistance, present-tense exclusion and the hope that other forms of solidarity can still be built.
That reading gives the work its political tension. The statues invoke a thinker whose critique of caste was sharply institutional and constitutional, while the empty plinths refuse to suggest that one tradition has solved every form of domination. South Africa is not used as a backdrop alone; it becomes part of the argument about how struggles can travel, diverge and find new interlocutors.
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- State the reported facts separately from interpretation: four unequal plinths, two Ambedkar statues and two vacant supports were described at Nirox in 2019.
- Attribute symbolic proposals to Menon, including the possible varna reference and the reading of the empty plinths as invitations.
- Do not treat the “first Ambedkar statues on the African continent” formulation as independently confirmed.
- Do not assume the installation remains on view, or that its current access and ownership are known.
- Keep Gandhi and Ambedkar distinct even while considering the historical conversation Menon constructs between them.
Further reading
Menon discusses Ambedkar’s What Gandhi and Congress Have Done to the Untouchables, written in 1946, as an extensive critique of elections, caste, money power and the prospects for social transformation through a political document. Readers seeking the book should check the edition and availability separately, since the 2019 article does not establish a current listing.
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