Liminal - artworks by Savia Mahajan

LIMINAL SAVIA MAHAJAN Text by K. Sridhar

LIMINAL

Produced by

F35/36 Dhanraj Mahal, CSM Marg, Apollo Bunder, Colaba, Mumbai 400001. www.tarq.in

SAVIA MAHAJAN

Artworks by Savia Mahajan Designed by Anugraha studioanugraha.com

Text by K. Sridhar

INTRODUCTION “Liminal” is Savia Mahajan’s first solo exhibition at TARQ. The artist explores through a variety of mediums – including sculpture, drawing and installation – notions of life, death and the in-between. While her sculptures use conventional pottery materials, including porcelain, paper and clay, she also experiments with chemicals such as cobalt, iron oxide and even gold in her detailed sculptures. With these materials, she creates a vast range of objects, from fossils to books, to a series of shape-shifting objects. Also included in the exhibition are Savia’s intricate drawings on recycled paper, which mirror her preoccupations with detail, nuance and material.

As a potter, and an obsessive collector, Savia has collected a number of urns that are used across cultures to store the remains of the dead. As part of the series, “beginning – end – beginning” she uses these to deeply question our very existence as particles on the earth, bringing together a complex thread of thought, best articulated by Professor K. Sridhar In his essay on the show, he says - “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. It returns to the age-old, probably never-to-be-answered, question of whether there exists anything other than the body which survives death…

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.”

Hena Kapadia Gallery Director

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night, suspended mid-air between the earth and the skies and, most significantly, not inside or outside the house but on the threshold – the limen, the domain of liminality.

LIMINAL Text by K. Sridhar Life and death probably make sense only in their gerund forms, as living and dying, because they coexist, cohere and complement each other in a larger process which is both dynamic and eternal.

The world itself can be thought of as arising through a synthesis of these two apparently antithetical elements. The synthesis, however, is far from complete – it is uneven and disjoint for life and death are but the two ends of the dynamical continuum and there is much that inhabits the in-between, the interstices.

The in-between cannot be ignored: one has to learn to dig into these interstices, into the processes that interpolate between life and death. This is the exploration of the liminal, the otherwise ignored junctions between the polar opposites that we see this world as being made of.

The method of episteme is to impose on the processes of this world the rigid binaries of thought. Analysis cleaves the amorphous reality that it apprehends into bipolar opposites so as to arrive at knowledge – epistemic knowledge. However, mythology alerts us to the dangers of such epistemic arrogance and in no place more eloquently than in the legend of Prahlad.

Prahlad’s father, Hiranyakashipu has been bestowed a boon that his death can be caused by neither a human being nor an animal, neither in the day- nor in the night-time, not inside his house or outside and neither on the earth nor in the skies. He is so blinded by arrogance that he is incapable of acknowledging the liminal – that which lives on the threshold. And so he is destined to die at the hands of Narasimha, a form half-human and half-beast, at the twilight hour which is neither day or

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Mythology also informs us that the threshold, the boundaries, the horizons and the margins are the domain of Hermes. He is the patron god of all that transpires between boundaries and margins, of all human action that involves mediation, illusion and deceit but he also mediates between humans and God for he is the messenger of Zeus. He oversees all boundaries, but also the most important of them all – the one between life and death. Hermes is the god of the liminal. Heidegger, in an insightful reading, suggests that it is to Hermes that we also owe hermeneutics – the act of interpretation in which one takes on the responsibility of being a listener and responding as one.

Seen in this light, it is significant that Hermes is the messenger of God for this messenger relays God’s word to us through texts and our own responsibility as human beings is to listen to these texts. Hermeneutics is constituted of such interpretative acts and it is these that explore Hermes’ liminal domain – the domain of inter-textuality.

In her set of works entitled Liminal, Savia Mahajan seeks to explore the transient spaces between the most enduring binaries of all – life and death. Her works reveal a preoccupation with the symbolism of death but seen particularly as a process in which life and death co-exist. In particular, Savia persists with the question of what survives death and dissolution. Is there anything beyond the ‘material given’ that survives death? The religious/philosophical culture that informs Savia through these metaphysical explorations is composite that is a natural consequence of her own situation and history. Though she comes from a Christian background, her family’s conversion to Christianity is recent. Consequently, Savia’s conceptual make-up is secular and addresses other cultural registers and symbols.

I would resist using the word spiritual in a general context -- a worn-out, exhausted term used to describe a state of cultural confusion so peculiar to our sub-continent – but I think it is an apposite description of Savia’s quest for the immaterial residue that survives even death. It is the use of the word spiritual in a primordial sense and so to say her search is ‘more spiritual

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and less religious’ would be right. It is important to bear this in mind when engaging with the works displayed in Liminal.

Though there is a rather obvious connection of the images in this show with a Christian symbolism, to view it from only that perspective would be limiting the vision with which the artist has approached the task of producing these works.

For the set of six sculptural works Liminal Entities, after which the show is eponymously titled, Savia works primarily with porcelain and paper. The choice of porcelain for works of this kind is unusual, associated as it usually is with decorative and functional uses because of the smoothness that it is capable of yielding. Savia works ‘against the grain’ with the porcelain to lend a rough texture to this set of sculptures. This she achieves by mixing the porcelain with paper which has been cured over a substantial period of time. The working in of rust and a second firing of the material gives this set of works the final form it assumes. The decomposing paper and the rust are primary elements of this work. Through these elements, Savia works in not just decay but also time. The clock is ticking, albeit very slowly.

Lithified Lives is a set of sixteen sculptural works with clay and paper. The method of making each sculpture here is very similar to the ancient practice of making palimpsests. The binding of a book is ripped apart and the book is ‘rebound’ with clay layered between the pages. When this is fired at a high temperature, the book disappears leaving only its obscure imprint on the clay.

This is a palimpsest – but of a different kind. The ‘rewriting’, as it were, is not a firm impression on an erased substratum but rather a hazy superimposition. The significant difference is that the imprint superimposed, in the present case, is a simulacrum of the original book, not a new book in a new language. Savia experiments with a range of minerals and chemicals on the surface of these works which when fired leave multi-hued impressions. Tradition, especially the occidental, identifies the spoken word with soul and the written with the body. The book and the fire of the furnace are evocative of funeral rites and the obscure imprints left behind by the book and the dyes suggestive of spirit. These metaphors speak eloquently through the sculptural works that Savia has created. This set of sculptures also evokes another image from Borges’ Book of Sand. Because

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such a book is infinite, like the grains of sand it is made of, when confronted with it we are left hopelessly contemplating the finitude of our own existence.

The destruction of the book i.e. body is revisited in another sculptural work entitled Spine of Spine. In this work, Savia has used the spines of notebooks, 219 of them to be precise, cured and hardened to make clay to use for her powerful sculptural work – a 14.5 feet-long vertebral column. The human spine is again the remnant after the body i.e. the book has been destroyed.

Savia make clever use of the rebus as a device to reiterate the metaphor that runs, like a spine, through the body of her work.

This work also makes reference to the somewhat constrictive practices of modern knowledge-making – where the book is the final product and the attention is drawn away from the real observation of the spine to the information about the vertebral column in a book. This work, in a phenomenological turn, inverts this process, destroys the spine of the book in order to create the object of direct study. This inversion is more in line with traditional and indigenous knowledge systems which though rich in the knowledge-resources that they have to offer remain in the margins of conservative knowledge-making practices.

Another work of sculpture, Exhume, of manganese-based clay and topped off with 24-carat gold, is virtually a record of the process of creating art that Savia is engaged in. The work results from a physical encounter that Savia has with the clay medium that she is working with. She pounds, teases, hits and thrashes the medium and leaves a very definite impression of her hands on the clay – the palms, the fingers, the touch and the physical pounding. Fired with a gold topping, this work becomes a record of the process – a clay sculpture detailing, in a self-referential way, how the clay sculpture was made. Pieces of the clay that she pulls of the main mass in the process are also sculpted spontaneously into shapes and forms, as though undergoing a transmutation of sorts in the process. Savia literally ‘writes herself into’ this work and dramatically inverts what she has been doing in the rest of the show, by bring herself and her body into the body-text equation.

Savia’s complete absorption in the conceptual frame that she

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has laid out for herself is evident in the installation entitled Shape-shifting field. This is a site- and context-specific installation whose elements are small white hollow tubes made of paper-clay and are the result of months of ceaseless effort. As the work evolved, the colour and the texture of these elements led Savia to conceive them as bones which also then aligns this work with the artist’s primary concerns. These bones when put together in the installation seem to form abstract images and do not, at first sight, seem in any way ominous. But a more careful look, especially in conjunction with the rest of the elements of the show, brings one back to confront the question of our own mortality. Time is not directly referred to in this work but, at a deeper level, the work is about temporality and the ephemeral nature of human existence.

of whether there exists anything other than the body which survives death. It returns to this question not to seek ready answers but to temper the arrogance that stems from the takenfor-grantedness of the material world. 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.

Ephemerality is also the theme of the set of installations that Savia has put together - a collection of urns which she has acquired during her many travels. Savia has a deeper emotive connection with the urns that go beyond the present show: her search for new urns will continue and that quest is likely to mark her artistic concerns in the future. In the installations, these urns are filled with and surrounded by ashes. The presence of the ashes around the urn intends to again engage the viewer with the question of death whereas the urns, on their own, may not have necessarily pointed towards it. By bringing the urns in conjunction with ashes, Savia exploits the technique of visual allusion to bring the viewer to her frame of reference.

Savia complements her sculptural presentations with four penand-ink drawings – Drift, Colony, Fault and Shape-Shifting Field Study. Her skilful use of lines on paper, which has deliberately been made to appear with folds, creates a sense of rupture and fragmentation. She intentionally avoids the very focused approach that she uses in her sculptures and allows her drawings to reveal tentativeness and vulnerability.

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. It returns to the age-old, probably never-to-be-answered, question

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Liminal entity 1 Porcelain paper clay and stain based slip Fired at 1250°C 2016

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Liminal entity 2 Porcelain paper clay and rust [Fe2O] Fired at 1250째C and re-fired at 750째C 2016

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Liminal entity 3 Porcelain paper clay, stain based slip and rust [Fe2O] Fired at 1250째C and re-fired at 750째C 2016

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Liminal entity 4 Porcelain paper clay Fired at 1250°C 2016

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Lithified lives 2 Ceramic stains, titanium dioxide [TiO2] and cobalt [Co] based slips and ash Fired at 1220°C and re-fired at 1260°C 2014

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Lithified Lives 3 Ceramic stains, porcelain and iron oxide [Fe2O3] based slips Fired at 1250°C 2014

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Lithified Lives 4 Ceramic, manganese dioxide [MnO2], iron oxide [Fe2O3] and cobalt [Co] based slips Fired at 1280°C 2014

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Lithified Lives 5 Ceramic, manganese dioxide [MnO2], iron oxide [Fe2O3] based slip, wood ash, glass and epoxy Fired at 1250°C 2014

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Lithified Lives 13 Ceramic stains, manganese dioxide [MnO2] based slip and Epoxy Fired at 1260°C (twice) 2014

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Exhume Ceramic, manganese dioxide [MnO2] based clay body, calcium carbonate [CaCO3] based glaze and 24 karat gold [Au79] Fired at 1200째C and re-fired at 750째C 2017

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Exhume (detail) Ceramic, manganese dioxide [MnO2] based clay body, calcium carbonate [CaCO3] based glaze and 24 karat gold [Au79] Fired at 1200째C and re-fired at 750째C 2017

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Shape-shifting Field (detail) Porcelain paper clay 8620 individual pieces Fired at 1260°C 2014 - 2015

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Beginning-End-Beginning (detail) Collected urns in copper, bronze and terracotta with silk cloth, Bhuj terracotta with base, ceramic with iron lid and hook, pewter, sand stone, Jaisalmer yellow lime stone, clear glass with brass lid, wood, granite, marble. All urns filled with bone ash and plant ash 2014 - 2017

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Drift Pen and ink on handmade recycled cloth-paper 2017

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Colonies Pen and ink on Washi paper, stained with pomegranate skin and tea extracts 2016

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ABOUT THE ARTIST Savia Mahajan (b.1980) began her formal artistic training in her home city of Mumbai, at the L.S. Raheja School of Art. Though she trained as a painter, Mahajan’s practice has moved away from the medium of painting, towards ceramics since 2010. The transition has been the result of a “relinquishing of traditional art mediums (and) a deeper inquiry about practice.” She has worked extensively at a local pottery studio in Mumbai, which has given her the space to experiment and develop many of her ceramic processes and techniques, the results of which are a part of “Liminal” her first solo exhibition at TARQ. In 2003, Mahajan participated in an auction organized by Christie’s in Mumbai, in support of the NGO, Akanksha Foundation. In the same year, she was a part of two exhibitions – ‘Shakti’ and ‘Personal Gods’ at Gallery Beyond. She was a part of Chawla Gallery’s annual art exhibition, which was curated by Shibani Chawla and hosted at The Habitat Centre, New Delhi.

Mahajan has also participated at the Art Dubaifair in 2006.

Savia Mahajan lives and works in Mumbai.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Professor K. Sridhar teaches Theoretical Physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. His research is in the area of Theoretical High Energy Physics - a subject on which he has published extensively and presented several talks and lectures, both within academic and non-academic circles.

He has recently published a book on theoretical physics for Cambridge University Press titled Particle Physics of Brane Worlds and Extra Dimensions. He has taught several courses on the philosophy of science and has co-edited a volume on Integrated Science Education.

Other than physics, Prof. Sridhar’s interests span philosophy, literature and culture. He has published a work of literary fiction of critical acclaim called Twice Written. He has begun work on his second book of fiction titled Ajita. He also engages himself in things as diverse as writing on art, teaching philosophy and popular culture.

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Liminal | Savia Mahajan | About the artist | About the author

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