Masques were an allegory of ballet, ball, opera and people in a fancy dress competition in 16th century Europe. People wore masks and dressed in ways and acted out mythologies in theatrical performances where the audience participated in the reverie along with the actors. Raj Shahani presents a set of sculptures for Camellias sculpture garden, poetic renditions in stone, bronze, wood and ceramic that attempt to expand our imagination and perception of beauty so we come to recognise ourselves and flaws as beautiful and accepting of life.

Raj Shahani places pieces of Burma teak behind shining plates of metal – copper, gold, silver, panchadhatu, bronze, tin, brass and steel, reminding us of the ethereal presence of materials used in sculpture, but it also hides something valuable behind by a veneer of a shining metal. That shining metal is our alter ego, our ‘Mukhowta’, the mask that we don hiding our real beautiful selves in wood.

Raj repairs wooden makaras or corbels with bronze, brass, copper, panchaloha, silver, gold, steel and aluminium embellishments that are functional, minimal and simple but made of shining metal. They contrast with the wood but attract the eye due to their luminosity. Much like the clothes we wear to hide our bodies and distract the eye with brands to not reveal ourselves. We fear ourselves for the traumas we hold, the years we spend with our body in the journey of life, but the scars we hide are like the patina and textures the wood takes upon itself with aging. The beauty of old wood lies in its weathering and not the polish. Taking two long worn-out logs of teak Raj makes facsimile of dents, breakages and fissures in bronze and copper. He displays them in the alcoves, the real wood hiding behind the metal. An aesthetic measure is at play - we aren’t ever made to feel complete with our adornments.

How do we mirror our fantasy and fears as adults? That self which sits behind the alter of ego - ones whose secrets are never known but arise in the arts, the music and literature we pursue.

Raj Shahani sought himself out of difficulties of severe dyslexia and ADHD as a child - sketching. His drawings were alter egos, superheroes and people he saw himself as, not one scorned, bullied or isolated for being himself. Popular consumer advertising selling cosmetics and fashion in the 1970s in India would always appear with renditions of celestial beings in the female form often called ‘Apsaras’. Within cinema sequences the mode of fashion for Actors in Bollywood were drawn from these indigenous nymphs and fairies. Raj began seeing them as his superheroines, they embodied his spirit and he would endlessly doodle apsaras that he saw on magazine covers, creating dance sequences of a queer universe he would inhabit many years later. On a train back from a holiday in Calcutta he bought a terracotta Bankura horse, a large five-foot horse that he placed on his sleeping berth as he stood the two-day journey to Bombay. His fascination was with terracotta and the horse not as an inanimate object but one that came alive in his universe of day dreams. In the same dreams he saw himself as an Apsara, a divine celestial genderqueer being eager to entertain, dress and dance, seek many loves and exist without question.

At school he would make elaborate experiments with papier-mache, cardboard and paste fashioning human bodies his sisters would then steal to play as dolls. Years later, having settled in New York, Raj would come across Apsaras in the Metropolitan Museum, divine bodies that had broken arms pillaged from India for the antique trade by colonial adventurers. He would want to repair them, return them to their environments at home, allow the rain, dust, soot and vermillion of India to settle on them. Then as an artist at the Art Student League of New York he began sculpting people at ballet first until the apsara began to reappear. The Tribhanga geometric division of the body in Indian classical dance or sculpture also known as the triple-bend position with knees bent in one direction accentuating the waist became a form he was keen to explore in sculpture. He moved to Bombay in 2021 to explore a project where he would rescue and repair statues from sculpture studios that had been abandoned because of cracks, fissures and accidents. Their worth diminished as their beauty was imperfect. He would repair them with more valuable material and metal. A marble statue would be completed with bronze or one stone with a rarer stone. His studio in an industrial estate in Sewri became a place to expand his experiments so suddenly waste paper outside his compound became an ingredient for him to go back to his attempts at making human bodies out of paper as a child. This March 2024 at DLF Camellias Raj Shahani opens his magnum opus with a circular constellation of sculptures in bronze, marble, granite, stoneware, glass, terracotta, ceramic, iron and paper, each one of them are apsaras mirroring who Raj is - an artist a performer, someone we all love, but yet alone.

• Curator Name: Sumesh-Manoj-Sharma
• Email: info@anamkaraart.com