To be in your youth is to be fresh, cool, contemporary, courageous, and conspicuous, at the precipice of something. ‘Liminal Gaps’ at the NMACC in Mumbai is a youthful show. It awakens a quality of restless potential from one floor to another, embodying a different artist’s idea of liminality as they invite you to join them at their threshold, and in that, discover your own. Curated by the dynamic creative house, Triadic, in its signature expansive approach, the show makes something incredible of space at NMACC’s Art House, while taking it up with a thoughtful impunity.
The Raqs Media Collective (established in 1992) presents five works that are meditations on time. The underbelly connecting each floor is enveloped by a mural: a cobalt blue background with and expressions like ‘hit a raw nerve’, ‘nerves of steel’, ‘you have some nerve’ alongside drawings of neurons (nerve cells). One is welcomed on the next floor with Chromacron, where stripes of Pantone colours of the years 2000-2024 line up in chronological order, leading to the installation entitled Escapement. A collection of 27 seemingly identical clocks are marked with moods and emotions – remorse, awe, fear, epiphany – instead of numbers/hours. Another giant clock’s digits are replaced by words in the Devanagari script (used to write Sanskrit, Prākrit, Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali) that take on literal and symbolic meanings; shran (second), pran (life), atithi (guest), ritu (season), to name a few. At the ‘blank’ centre of the space sits ‘Betaal’, an augmented reality that can be seen using iPads, perceived by Raqs as an entity that moves in the liminal gap between time and consciousness.
