The Morbid Curiosity of Spaces
Sahil Naik’s first solo at Experimenter Gallery – “Ground Zero: Site as Witness/Architecture as Evidence” employs destruction, abandonment and decay on sites to conjure dead cities.
Experimenter comes up with another winner with Sahil Naik’s exhibition Ground Zero: Site as Witness | Architecture as Evidence. For his first solo show here, the artist painted the gallery walls to lend it an aged, weathered feel. The mood sets the scene for his architectural explorations. His installations of miniature scale architectural models or sites defaced with terror have been curated from places he has been to, worked in or are combed together from memory. His art breaks down the emotional havoc between the rubble and the ashen walls with deep sensitivity. They entomb the violence and the consciousness of the space. It’s art that is eerie, bleak, obsessively specific in the reality it depicts and poetic in its impact.
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Sahil Naik lives in Panaji. He was raised in the lanes that are home to the legendary Shanta Durga temple. The annual Shigmotsav, a folk festival, and Narkasur festival are where he realised his early artistic skills. Mythology seeped into his work in those early years and continues to be integral to his art. He recalls a time when visiting artists who were called in to define the facial expressions of the idols, had him transfixed, wanting to decode and understand the way emotion can be fused into subjects. From learning to commandeering the process of creating sculptures for the floats Sahil has come a long way from there. The irony doesn’t escape one that his installations today feature no people, but it is however filled to the brim with expression – a heavy rawness of life.
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Sahil believes his art’s tryst with mythology is almost pre-destined. In his residency at Khoj, Delhi. He worked surrounded by the migrant-scape of Khirkee, a congested maze of people and spaces. It is an overwhelming area, with architecture that is haphazard, on the brink and as an artist, he wanted to respond to the vulnerability of the space, explore its capricious sanctity. His work anchored on the iconic biblical tale – the Tower of Babel. A story that goes beyond its singular narrative to fuel a multitude of metaphors and symbolism. The city of Babel finally becomes one of chaos and confusion, divided and beaten. Khirkee for Sahil, a soaring symbol of migrant hope and enterprise in the capital held parallels. It too is emerging, growing, confident, diverse, divided, chaotic, confused. Will it meet a similar fate?
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Sahil majored in sculpture for his masters in Baroda, a natural progression from his days in Panaji. Revisiting his own history, digging deeper into his cache of memories is what led him to find his niche. As Sahil says, “his morbid curiosity of a space” became a leitmotif of his art. His installations have a forensic appeal, it is dense with clues, reeking of the evolving havoc, reverberating with conflict. The current solo has works that date back to his college days. In, Ground Zero, he talks of safe spaces or the perception of safe spaces. He says, “I am talking about the vulnerability of everyday spaces. How we consider terror as something which is distant. It can never happen to me. But today there is nothing which we can call a safe space. We cannot isolate from it. I am interested in the memory of these damaged spaces.” He looked at spaces that are everyday-havens, he chose his studio space and his college cafeteria and created miniature models of it. He conducted a controlled explosion on the model and what one sees is how he exhumes the trapped memories of the terror-stricken space. Like the artist’s statement states, “the fine line between the real and the staged blur … reflecting on ideas of perception, identity, the shifting nature of evidence and the retelling of conflicted history.” Sahil tells me, “Architecture is a witness to the crime. I want to explore that.”
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His work has strong emotions. Its baroque in the way it gets to you. It is dark and the imagery you envision tumble out like a Caravaggio painting. Except there are no characters just the corpse of a complex living space. As you analyse and review the elements of his art the stories and backstories and side stories emerge in your head and it leaves an open wound. Sahil manages to make the viewer internalise the tragedy. He says his installations can be compared to a photo album of moments trapped influx of its destruction and abandonment – a post-apocalyptic version of a dead city as he calls it.
This is an artist who should remain on your art radar.
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