RIDDLES OF THE WOR(L)D: POOJA SHAH
July 10 - August 05 , 2025
Riddles of the Wor(l)d – Set across shifting timelines, figures in Pooja’s paintings, appear trapped in space and spaces, within the confines of a house and the weight of their own atmosphere. They are either illuminated or shadowed, recessed or pushed to a side—positioned at the subliminal thresholds of doorway, or seated beside window. Stepping into her imagery, you begin to realize that nothing follows the continuum of the everyday.
Pooja Shah in her first exhibition, draws on the social sphere to probe, with irony and not without tangles of emotions, the personal and social dynamics of contemporary life. The recurring characters in paintings are her family members, relatives, strangers—all based on images from the photo album and everyday snapshots. While attuned to metaphor, her work carries an air of enigma around distinct figures, placed within sparse and evacuated rooms, inviting us to grasp, if at all, the mind is an end in itself. Alternatively, a cast of characters is often linked by light, doors, and windows—which, in turn, become quiet protagonists. The interior atmosphere she presents feels like an aberration; more importantly, the house becomes a relational space—its compulsions shaping the inner and outer modes of the individual mind.
Born and raised in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, Pooja’s early interests rooted in the humanities, later found intersections with the visual arts during her postgraduate studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Vadodara. It is here that she turns her attention to the people around her, their gestures, behaviours, and emotions, and begins to analyse them more closely.
“…although they take on a number of subjects, they are linked by an abiding curiosity about what it means to be human. How we see, remember, feel, and interact with other people? What does it mean to sleep, to dream, and to speak?
And what does one look like, when not looking oneself in the mirror? In Pooja’s solidly painted images, figures appear at the cusp of a doorway, where they stand backlit or between interior and exterior worlds. At the same time, her characters are caught in an unpremeditated state, off-guard, absorbed in fleeting moments. In Grumbling for instance, a girl in shorts and a blouse, a mop stick in hand stares out at you or perhaps at someone over your shoulder. In somewhat eccentric stance; natural light streaming in behind her, her body language is sturdy, yet an unease in her cautious eyes. Elsewhere, the same girl appears more at ease, flaunting a pen and book seated by the window. Pooja paints rest of the canvas in earthy tones, and somehow, the lightness of a mosquito net heightens the atmosphere across this otherwise muted canvas. A nearby figure, face covered behind still curtain, curled into bed and holding a book, seems to lifts itself – improbably caved and levitating. In an ease of a specter, becomes visible to you. A similarly laid-back character recurs in one of the smaller works on paper, a series titled Threaded through routine—absorbed in a book, her presence fully revealed in the daylight.
In the same large canvas, a mirror quietly reflects a woman caressing a cat, perhaps a stranger falling out of the girl's line of sight. Pooja turns this seemingly domestic scene into an uncanny episode. We as spectators, remain relevant observers—witnesses to what lies outside the mirror. Can we really apply complete logic to this situation? Or is enigma the very gap we leap across, to move past what is seen?
In another series, in a precise style, she sets characters in a sequel or in absence. Two moments plays out summoning a quiet disquiet, Deliberate Distance I inhabited by a man, sits slouched in a corner, staring out as if in vain, in front of a served plate as though literalizing the act of weighing recollections. On the other side of the canvas are the lit-up faces at a social gathering. Another from the related series, Deliberate Distance II, a moment of soliloquy is embodied by a shadowed woman, as you become insider, looking across the room from her side. From the adjacent room, a clique of well-dressed women, teehee!—gather in a vacant room. On looking closely, a cropped hand of a missing figure emerges. Pooja’s painting is not arbitrary. In her careful arrangements of objects and devices, a decades-old television mounted on the wall, paired by a set-top box, its screen flashing image of a man’s face. You might think, is the hand pointing to him, or the woman? Despite the distinct qualities these spaces hold, they seem to exist in different time registers, suspended between recollections and the present. In each paired scenes, one figure is portrayed alone: solitary, reclusive, wrapped in a sense of cultural apprehension. Both seem caught in a state of simultaneity and separation.
Pooja’s paintings depict aging yet robust figures immersed in fixing things, peeling vegetables, activities that go beyond ordinary everyday tasks. In one of the works, Sunday Ritual, a neatly dressed man, busy with his tools as if passing time, is teased by a woman from inside the room. Caught in a furtive glance, this episode is witnessed by a girl. In distinct frames of conversation, Pooja ties together these formal gestures: a door appears to open into a weekly loop of domestic moments and responsibilities. Sunday’s schedule unfolds as a procedural ritual within the household. In a shared moment of levity, the man used to the habit, pays her no mind. Each figure caught in what feels like a “funny weather.” There is a dialectical tug at play that resists opening the inside and outside. One of the works where Pooja allows chatter and energy to spill between the room and the backyard, while a window conceals what lies inside.
We do encounter a few rare appearances in Heritage at Stake, two men confront viewers with a shy smile, as if to avert their gaze. One stands, balancing the other on a wooden pedestal, both oddly positioned within the doorway. Her elaborate arrangement of showcased objects, evokes an aura of ceremonial room: a show of decorative objects, a stack of unused utensil on either side of the two, almost like paraphernalia exchanged during a marriage or heirloom passed down from inheritance. Pooja’s painting captions act as ‘entry points’ into the representations. You might ask: do their smiles hold more than they seem to reveal?
With a considerate detailing across the picture plane and a perspectival interplay, Pooja lends her work a layered complexity, opening portals for characters to slip into eccentricity, with a subversive intent. In doing so, her approach to painting hovers between the formal and the abstract, keeping viewers teetering on the cusp of speculation. Her images linger on the edge of awareness, set aside by projections of a kind, of labyrinth even as the characters remain firmly rooted within the lit rooms. In Awkward Voidness, a couple—seemingly unaffected by anyone else's presence, goes about their routines in separate rooms. You stand at a vantage point, focusing your gaze into a beige-grey, blackish corridor. As you become familiar with her quiet protagonists—figures who never meet your gaze, in contemplation and set apart by the abstract passageway, Pooja does not simply rethink domestic space as it is. She embeds contradiction in capturing an image, an instant that both records and disrupts. This is one of paintings in the show, where each character’s inward gaze echoes the lingering rift between them.
How, then, do we comprehend the paradoxes of human emotion, of fragmented minds trying to settle into a place? In Pooja’s work, memory and imagination shape the positioning of images and objects rooted in spatial context. A further layer of understanding may lie in her series of smaller works, Threaded through routine, where these images carry something personal, implicit in the positioning of figures who gaze at or caught off-guard by the artist. For Pooja, these seemingly ordinary acts of routine not merely as nostalgic place to be looked back on, but of lived history, embedded in the rituals of domestic time. It is then in the large canvases across the gallery that we are pushed in the realm of unknowing, drawn away from comprehension and into the unifying loop of subject and object, public and private, personal and social patterns. Her painterly language in thin layers of paint, gentle highlights, and subdued yet contrasting palette that merges and reveals, elaborates and obscures, alleviates and unsettles, as if poised between ‘dexterity’ and ‘ambiguity.’ Riddles then are posed in composed appearances: in (un)familial rituals and routines, paired scenes, blurring inside-out spaces, in shadow and beneath flashlight. They unfold along timelines stretching from the past to the future, linking history with the present. As we are led through her quiet protagonists, Pooja’s methodical gestures resist easy legibility, like a refusal to fill in the chasm—slowly inhabiting our minds.
– Shruti Ramlingaiah
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