Sunken, yet forever on the surface of the heart
It attempts to produce agile, shapeshifting memories in the form of narrative, digital dreams (and nightmares) for a fast-deteriorating physical landscape and the people and memories tied to it.
Since 2016, Naik has been researching and documenting the village of Curdi in Goa, India. The construction of the modernist Selaulim Dam sank the village overnight, displacing thousands in the 1960s. Each summer however, the waters of the reservoir receded, and the village resurfaced briefly. Her people returned each year to symbolically occupy their homes and pray to the ruins. With warmer temperatures and irregular rainfall patterns, the deterioration of the structures has accelerated in recent years.
How can we preserve a landscape for future generations in the face of the ongoing climate catastrophe? How can we cultivate oral histories on to cold, three-dimensional, digital translations? This “video” work draws from the disciplines of geospatial mapping and cartography, archaeology and museum studies, navigational, first-person video games, and documentary forms to present an “encounter,” a sensorium that resists erasure.
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Sahil Naik
(b. 1991, Goa) is an Indian artist whose 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 with a focus on South Asia and the non-aligned world. Naik has a postgraduate degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda and an undergraduate degree from Goa College of Art. He has exhibited at the Delfina Foundation and Asia House, London, UK; Bridget Donahue as a part of Condo, New York; Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; Khoj International Artists’ Association and the Serendipity Arts Festival, India; and the Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Aomori, Japan. He also participated in Five Million Incidents, organized by Goethe-Institut New Delhi with RAQS Media Collective. His solo exhibitions include All Is Water and To Water We Must Return (2021), Monuments, Mausoleums, Memorials, Modernism (2020), and Ground Zero (2017) at Experimenter, Kolkata. He will be a participating artist at the 5th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale curated by Shubigi Rao (postponed). He lives and works in Goa.