For over a decade now, Sahil Naik’s practice has studied and complicated images by negotiating with and/or recalibrating them. These investigative, sometimes forensic exercises seek the evidentiary and speculative potential of materials and their capacity to bear witness - “what may have occurred and under what circumstances”. Naik continues to approach and apprehend these images, re-staging them as scenographies. In producing intimate encounters and/or drawing our attention to the “background”, we see minor details and situational clues unfold. In this an unraveling of “history as we know it or as it were prescribed” instigated.
In Sour Stars and Breadfruit Monsoons, Naik conceives a scenography of image-fragments, isolated from early-colonial landscape studies and murals adorning colonial architecture across Goa, Bombay and Daman - whilst drawing a larger conceptual, architectural and botanical relationship to sister colonies in South America, Africa and Asia. In interrogating these materials, he produces before-after and in-between land and ocean worlds
The violent colonial cross-planting exercise heralded a tense and transformative relationship between landscapes - seed, plant, fruit and pest. We see this worlding occur across language and food. This contamination can be attributed to three epochs - the ships that intentionally and accidentally carried ships and diseases; the transplantation between “royal” botanical gardens across the colonies and the world wars.
A peculiar condition to note here is that even though the plant migrated to a new context, the local language was yet to fully absorb it.
For example, the Nirphanas (Breadfruit) curiously translates to “Water Jackfruit” and is prepared as a substitute to fish (for its fish-like texture) during breeding season (monsoons) in Goa. That its earliest image-reference is a 16th century drawing by a Carmelite nun in a baroque chapel depicting it as an offering to an ant-hill is telling of the many histories this exhibition lays claim to.
– Exhibition essay by Mario D’Souza
Sahil Naik (b. 1991 lives and works in Goa, India) draws from a range of disciplines and exercises, including architectural practice, forensics, archeology and landscape painting to conjure propositional images. His works were included in the 17th Lyon Biennale curated by Alexia Fabre, the 5th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale curated by Shubigi Rao and the 5th Art Encounters Biennale, Timsoara curated by Adrian Notz. He has exhibited with In ruins at the Matera National Museums, Italy; TBA 21 on st_age; and at Foundation Elpis, Milan; How to reappear curated by Kayfa ta at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, MMAG Foundation in Amman and the Beirut Art Center; Vitrine in Basel; Delfina Foundation and Asia House in London; Khoj International Artists’ Association and the Serendipity Arts Festival, India; and the Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Aomori, Japan and with HH Art Spaces in Goa. His solo presentations include Spectres, Specimens and Ships in Doubt (2023); All Is Water And To Water We Must Return (2021); Monuments, Mausoleums, Memorials, Modernism (2020) and Ground Zero (2017) at Experimenter, Kolkata. He was a recipient of Five Million Incidents, instituted by Goethe Institut New Delhi with RAQS Media Collective. He was awarded the inaugural Warehouse 421 Artistic Research Grant; the Arts (Productions) grant by the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore and was the inaugural recipient of the Prameya Art Foundation Publishing Grant for South Asia with VASL in Pakistan, Britto Arts Trust in Bangladesh and Theertha in Sri Lanka. In 2025, Naik curated a trans-oceanic exhibition titled Not a shore, neither a ship, but the sea itself for Serendipity Arts Foundation’s tenth anniversary edition in Goa. His first artist book was published by Roli Books in 2025.
