The team at TARQ is happy to present Savia Mahajan’s second solo show at the gallery, titled Amino Soup. The show comes after her major institutional interventions at the first Indian Ceramics Triennale and the second edition of The Sculpture Park, Madhavendra Palace, Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur, in 2019, and builds on the themes of resurgence and materiality that have been central to Mahajan’s practice from the very start.
In a new series of the artist’s signature ceramic books, titled Pietra, the artist uses fire and rocks to symbolize external pressures, looking at how things that were once stagnant are forced out of their inertia into a state of change that eventually leads to their evolution. The series Emergency old longing finds its roots in Mahajan’s works from 2019 such as Liminal, but this time the rust and white colours of the work speak about an urgency to move from one state to the other. The abstract, surreal, and often weird forms are indicative of being tied down, but now bursting out to become something more.
In the intervening pandemic, the artist was confronted with the loss of access to her studio, and as a response to this, she began to make Palm pebbles, an interactive installation made of unfired clay, graphite, seeds, glass shards and lead – which invites viewers to play with them and consider their weight, weightlessness, and materiality. Made over the same time period, the works Exuvia and Tempus fugit explore themes of shedding skin and chemical transformation over time.
The most recent, and central work of the show, Pillars of creation is created with Ashok Siju, a young Indigo master who comes from a lineage of weavers in the Vankar community of Bhujodi village in Kutch, Gujarat. Made in high-fired porcelain, the work is dyed in natural Indigo in his traditionally fermented vats. The work examines ideas of constant creation and destruction, shedding and emerging.
According to Ranjit Hoskote, who has written a text accompanying the show, “Savia Mahajan’s sculptures and drawings record a dynamic, often startlingly unpredictable dialogue between material and form, process, and event. A dialogue marked by leaps, ruptures and surprise...Her gift for sliding across the borders between media is in evidence when she speaks, for instance, of staining or dyeing, rather than glazing, her ceramic sculptures with rust, indigo and verdigris. Monocultural notions of formal, conceptual and material purity have no place in her world-view: she characterises clay as a ‘carrier material’, one that conveys an elemental energy from material to object, from object to viewer.”
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About the Artist
Savia Mahajan began her formal artistic training in her home city of Mumbai, at the L.S. Raheja School of Art. Savia completed her post-graduation in Indian Aesthetics from Jnanapravaha in 2022. Though she trained as a painter, since 2010, Savia’s practice began moving away from the medium of painting, towards ceramics.
These developments in Savia’s practice resulted in Liminal — her first solo exhibition at TARQ in 2017. This was followed by a landmark group exhibition—Mutable: Ceramics and Clay Art in India Since 1947, curated by Dr. Annapurna Garimella and Sindhura D.M. at the Piramal Art Foundation, Mumbai in 2019. Savia has recently been a part of several projects including India Art Fair in Delhi (2020), solo project Resurgō at TARQ’s booth, Art Basel, Hong Kong (2019); and group presentations including Osmosis, a group exhibition curated by Shaleen Wadhwana at TARQ in 2019; the second edition of The Sculpture Park, The Madhavendra Palace, Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur, curated by Peter Nagy (2018-19) and the First Indian Ceramics Triennale, Jaipur, (2018) among others. Savia is a part of the A-Cube collaborative, that fosters ideas of blurring the lines between architecture, art and artisanship. She is also a part of the board of Karigar Shala Trust, an artisan school in Bhuj Kutch.
Savia lives and works in Mumbai.
