La chasse aux idées folles is a live performance rooted in subconscious exploration, where circus and art merge with my contemplation of symbols and transgenerational patterns. The work summons treasures and traps, silences and colonial traumas — fragments that interlace within the fabric of the genealogical tree.

La chasse aux idees folles

Rasoi is a mixed media work combining thread, buttons, lentils, and rice with sacred geometry embedded in resin hovering over textile. Rasoi, meaning “kitchen” in several South Asian languages, anchors the piece in a space of intimacy, offering, and nurture.

  
The work juxtaposes the precision of Indo-Persian geometric ornamentation with the tactility of domestic materials, evoking the kitchen as both shrine and memory space. Rice and lentils—symbols of sustenance—scatter into the sacred grid, softening its symmetry with quiet, embodied gestures.

  
Rasoi celebrates the domestic realm not as confinement, but as a site of tenderness, transmission, and quiet power—where nourishment becomes ritual and care becomes language.

Rasoi

  
This work draws on the Persianate heritage of South Asia.

The pomegranate—an emblem of fertility, life, and renewal—grows from the crowns of dancing figures, pulling them toward an origin, a nostalgic past. Floating roots extend from their feet, attempting to anchor them in the present.

  
Parrots in the borders symbolize wisdom and the transmission of knowledge across generations. Embroidered rabbits move in circular rhythms—clockwise and counterclockwise—evoking the flow of time, where past and present dissolve into a shared, liminal space.

  
Together, they form a quiet chorus—remembering what was lost, reimagining what can still grow.

  

Where the pomegranate grows

Cocooned in her rattan chair, she oscillated between prayer and the crocheting of the edges of her garments, navigating the sacred and the profane, the temporal and the eternal. She was the guardian of all traditions, holding the meanings and subtleties, the symbols and gestures. To attempt to penetrate her paradigm, I meditate on the patterns that emerge from the flower of life, the Arabic letters with their profound Sufi symbolism, and the tenderness embodied in her memory.

Daadi Jaan

Nature has long been anthropomorphized in the way I was taught to connect with it. I was told not to disturb the plants after 6 PM, to avoid the shadow of trees as dusk falls, for their spirits grow restless. Stories of trees with metaphysical properties were woven into my understanding: the cypress, a guardian of death and the underworld; the ebony, our island's protector, its roots deep in Mauritian soil; the henna, a sacred bridge to the divine.

  
In this work, I find myself reaching toward the vibrant spiritual realm, seeking to harmonize with the anthropomorphized essence of nature. The world of spirits is rich in color and life, contrasting sharply with my own colorless presence. I playfully extend a water lily leaf to a peacock—emblems of rebirth and new beginnings—creating a bridge between the rich hues of the spiritual realm and the subdued tones of my own reality.

The liminal space

So long! romanticising a disapeared pet rabbit

My inquiry for "A Window" explores the uniqueness of the Muslim community here, a blend of engaged workers who have lost all trace of their origins and who eclectically appropriate Islamic aesthetics, ranging from Orientalized Saudi culture to Bollywood. Additionally, the Muslims of Mauritius also include merchants from northern India who identify with "Indo-Persian" aesthetics.

  
"A Window" offers a whimsical glimpse into the eclectic aesthetic appropriation that shapes the interiors of Mauritian Muslims; it serves as an invitation to reflect on this interiority.

A window

“We thought of our banal idealization of each other as Divine and the Divine

knocked us off into a state of confusion.”

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Shaheen Saliahmohamed

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