About the Actant
© Sahil Ravindra Naik
Sahil Naik's practice traverses evidence, architecture, mythology and the internet through the act of witnessing and history making. His current project Monuments, Mausoleums, Memorials, Modernism studies the violence of the nation-building project in the Non-aligned world. Naik completed his MVA (Sculpture) from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda (Distinction) and BFA with a specialisation in Sculpture (First Division) from Goa College of Art. His debut solo exhibition took place at Experimenter, Kolkata (2017). In 2018, he exhibited at Delfina Foundation, London and Asia House, London, UK; Khoj International Artists’ Association, India and the Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Aomori, Japan.
© Sahil Ravindra Naik
37 Sinkings: The re-emergence and submergence of the village of Curdi occurs every year. The incident of 1977-78, in the recurring act of sinking holds no more importance than the "first submergence". It is imperative then to amputate history from the incident and instead use the latter as a site of preservation and production. This is twofold – the preservation of ways of life, in the absence of the physical site, achieved in the return to, and returning of certain objects to their original positions for a brief period. The second is the act of mourning, performed at a distance – in the act of recollecting that occurs in the submerged phase of the village. The deterioration of the structures creates a space of confusion where oral narratives are slowly getting altered or erased as the physical anchor or trigger of specific memories. Sahil is interested in suspecting this temporal loop is a predestination paradox. In spacetime, the future imagination of Curdi is based on a past event, which in turn causes the future event.