Explore Liminal States Through Savia Mahajan’s Creations

Text by Huzan Tata

Fossils, books and shape-shifting objects are on display at the artist’s first solo exhibition at Tarq

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Exploring questions of life, death and everything in between, Savia Mahajan’s latest show presents a series of stark works in various media. The Mumbai-based artist, who shifted her practice from painting to ceramics a few years ago, loves to explore the ‘liminal’ spaces that transcend after death, and the journeys that follow. Says K.S. Sridhar in his note on the show, “Liminal wants us to return to a mode of art which chose to address primordial questions. It moves away from the questions that dominate public life; indeed, it asks what happens to those questions when they are confronted by death and dissolution…. When the book burns with the clay in the furnace, what does it leave behind? This is the question that Liminal forces us to face head-on.” Catch this one to ponder over your own thoughts on life and its wonders.

4 Questions with the artist, Savia Mahajan

Artistic Motivations “What motivates me to create art is to slowly allow works to germinate and come into being. I obsessively chase a thought for it to be realised, I live with it, marinate in it for a long period of time. I run through multiple experiments, drawing with various materials that I use, then the actual working process begins much later in time. The un-hurried process of it all coming together is exciting and motivating on an everyday level.”
Inspirations “My practice is inquiry-based, which deeply seeks answers from the cyclic nature of birth, death, rebirth. I am also interested in its thresholds, the in-between trance-like state called the liminal state.”
On the wall at home “I would love to have a wood-cut print by Zarina Hashmi.”
Concerns that find a place in your art “The earth integrating and disintegrating and constantly moving on like clockwork is fascinating, and more of an expression that finds its way into my art.”

Liminal is on display at Tarq, Mumbai (F-35, Dhanraj Mahal, Apollo Bunder) until September 9, 2017.