Tarika Sabherwal

Ko wai koe?
Ko Tarika tōku ingoa. I was born in Kolkata, India. My family and I moved to Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa in 2007.

What are your pronouns?
She/her

Where are you living right now?
Currently I’m staying at the Rita Angus Cottage in Te Whanganui-a-Tara for 6weeks as the summer resident. I am based in Tāmaki Makaurau.

What do you do and why do you do it?
I am a painter, a maker, a diy dyke. I do it because I’ve always navigated the world through making, it’s the way I process. There have been many creatives in my family who never had the opportunity to pursue or continue practicing their craft or passions, so I see making as an opportunity, a privilege and a push to unlearn inherited notions, thought patterns, societal expectations.

What are you working on at the moment?
I have been drawing a lot; collecting symbols and weaving them within and around each other. I’ve been working on newsprint booklets with permanent markers and want to make a flip book out of the collection of drawings. Playing with this idea of expanding and compressing layers. This drawing process feeds and informs my larger works on calico. I’ve been using line work to form a dense mass or noise to create a sense of movement within the work.

What is your earliest memory in an art gallery?
Auckland art gallery 2013 or 2012, I remember being excited to see so much in one place at one time. There is a kind of uncanny familiarity about an overload of the senses.

Do you listen to music when making? Who is your favourite musician right now?
I tend to play my hyper fixation repeat tunes, which is currently Mhaso by Shanka Tribe. I also love Rosalía’s new album. My all time favourite band has to be Tinarewen. And sometimes the sound and noise of the train station at my studio is the humming background to my making.

Is there an artwork that changed the way you view the world?
I think Olympia changed the way I wanted to make art. It did a lot for confronting the male gaze but it still sat in the realm of centering the dominant experience/narrative. Looking at that work made me think of the what ifs. What if it was reimagined, de-centering the colonial gaze. This is when I started exploring storytelling from different perspectives, placing my personal narratives into existing frameworks/stories and diving into the what ifs.